


ain't it better to jump, baby, than wait for the fall?

by hypotheticalfanfic



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Blackouts, F/F, F/M, Force Ghosts, Force Sensitivity, M/M, Multi, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Romance, Sign Language, The Force, Trauma, no longer canon compliant after tlj sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2018-08-07 23:19:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7733725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jessika Pava, whose Force sensitivity is both a closely guarded secret and a continuous source of pain for her, gets the mission to go fetch the General's wandering monk of a brother. That the girl she's been nursing a crush on is there too, that's just another uncomfortable part of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. all it entails is living so why are we so tense?

“Pava?” Poe’s eyebrows pulled together, half confused and half feeling out the question for weak spots. It was the expression he wore most often when called to General Organa’s chambers, since she was nearly always twelve steps ahead and three steps to one side of him. 

“That’s her name, isn’t it?” The General knew perfectly well, and Poe knew that she knew.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, what are your impressions of her?”

Poe took a moment, weighed his words. “Positive, sir. She’s smart. Solid. A good pilot.”

“Is she Force-sensitive?” The General had that look in her eye, the one that usually ended with Poe in some foolhardy, ridiculous, impossible plan that worked way too often and made him too excited and happy. He hated that look and loved it in equal measure.

“No more than anyone else, any good pilot, I mean.”

“Tell me about her.” The General ruffled through a half-dozen maps, the paper faded and nearly thin enough to see through. Poe thought, though he couldn’t be certain, that she grinned behind them.

Poe tried for a shrug, ended up with his shoulders up around his ears like a child. “Smart, like I said. She’s from Dandoran, big family. Parents were smugglers, died when she was a kid. Not superstitious, not like Snap is, but she’s intuitive. Calm under fire. Reliable with the—with the squadron.” Somehow he’d avoided saying “with the ladies,” which was equally accurate, but the General looked like she knew what he’d almost said. She usually had that look.

“She sounds…interesting. I’ve heard rumors from the other pilots, contrary to what you’ve said, that she’s quite Force-sensitive. Foresight, that kind of thing.” The General put on a face of unconcern. “You say she isn’t, or not noticeably so?”

Poe shook his head. “Not, I mean, sorry sir, I wouldn’t say that. The foresight, it’s not like you think.” He tried to explain: when Pava got a feeling about something, or did something or said something that didn’t make sense, it usually worked out. She might, say, dress more warmly than needed, and then it would snow. Or she might get a bad feeling about a particular part of a mission and then that would be the part that screwed up, that nearly killed them all. Or she might gravitate toward a person at a particular time and then it turned out that the person really needed her right then. The third had been him, more than once, and the rest of the squadron occasionally. “What I mean, sir, is that it’s not a reliable kind of foresight. It’s never clear and even she doesn’t really understand it in the moment. Only later.”

General Organa nodded. “Sounds about right. It hits some people like that.”

“What hits them, sir?”

“The Force. For some people it’s something small like good luck at finding lost things, or a good sense of direction. For pilots, most of the time, it’s quick reflexes and maybe a tiny hint of foresight.” She half smiled. “For you, maybe quicker reflexes than most. For this Pava, sounds like she got a bit of both.”

“Yes, sir.” He still didn’t agree, not really, but there was never a point in arguing too hard with the General.

“Go get her. I want to talk to her.”

“About what, sir?” His face blanched. “Pardon my asking, sir, but Pava’s just back from that recon with Oddy, she’s probably dead to the world right now.”

“I understand your concern for your pilots, Dameron. I’m not going to eat her alive. I have a mission for her, once she’s rested up and ready.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir.”

* * *

He didn’t tell the General the whole truth, but he didn’t lie, either. Pava had always been a little bit mystic, was the thing. Not religious, not superstitious - so many pilots are, have half a hundred baubles and charms jingling all over their flight suits, say a special prayer and do a dance before they get in the cockpit. Snap could build a second fighter with the crap he’d picked up from every drunk false prophet on every forsaken backwater planet this side of the Rim. Not Pava. She was smart, sensible, careful. But the foresight thing had always been a little spooky. It scared her, even, or maybe not scared exactly but unsettled. He hadn’t lied when he said she never understood it when it happened. She always seemed confused when it hit her, like something was compelling her to act or say or do something. Like she wasn’t in control. Like she couldn’t stop herself.

Maybe that’s why the General thought it was the Force, but from what Poe knew about the Force, it didn’t — the Force wasn’t supposed to be a compelling kind of thing, at least in the stories. It flowed, it didn’t insist; it guided, didn’t control. That was the point, he was pretty sure, of some of the holodramas he’d grown up loving: that when you didn’t listen to the Force, things went wrong. The implied truth, then, had to be that the Force wasn’t supposed to force people to do a thing, that people were supposed to choose to heed it or not. But the General was plenty Force-sensitive herself, and she had a Jedi for a brother and grew up with more real knowledge about them than has been turned into children’s stories in Poe’s time. Maybe the stories were wrong, or Poe’s half-remembered childhood meetings with a couple of Jedi were wrong, or any number of ways he could be wrong.

He didn’t tell the General about the time Pava had gotten a bad feeling about a mission three years ago and had somehow ignored it, pushed it back, and that they’d come back six pilots short. That Pava had disappeared for nearly a week after that, showed up in a half-bar-half-brothel on one of the poorest and dirtiest desert planets. How it’d taken Poe and three of the brawniest pilots in the fleet to subdue her and bring her back. How she’d immediately given in to her impulses since then, but had traded off trusting herself to do it. She was still a sharp, terrifyingly good pilot, but she was afraid, too. The things the Force, or whatever it was, told her to do didn’t make sense, but she’d stopped even trying to fight them. She did what it told her, now, hopped to and didn’t question. While the results were hard to argue with, when those feelings or urges didn’t come, Pava almost seemed lost. She’d pick apart missions for hours, waiting for a feeling, when she was more than capable of pointing out the bad ideas and possible traps with her own brain.

It infuriated Poe to see, but he couldn’t find the words. How would he even broach the subject? “Hey Pava, you know how you’re kind of crazy but in a way that is occasionally really gods-damned useful? And you know how you’ve got this trauma about it because you ignored it that one time and some people died? Fuck that noise, you’re awesome.” That was as far as he’d ever gotten in planning it out in his head, and despite all outward appearances, Poe Dameron liked to have a plan. Not necessarily a good one, just a plan. Half a plan usually got his pilots dead or hurt, and less than that wasn’t worth acting on yet. The bit he’d written out in his head wasn’t even half, so he kept it there, picked at it once in a while, watched Pava carefully.

He realized he was still standing just outside the General’s map room. BB-8 wasn’t around, which meant she was probably with Finn or charging back at the quarters. He thought that maybe he ought to go find her, talk through what he was thinking in binary. Binary was incredibly difficult for him to speak, but he liked talking to BB-8 in her own language, one that took him effort to use but took her nearly as much work to understand. The extra work to express himself, especially emotions (binary wasn’t great at emotions) sometimes shook something loose, helped him see his way through a problem. BB-8 always laughed at his face when he had a binary-induced epiphany. Apparently his accent was deplorable, and he looked like a small child receiving a gift.

“Poe!” A shout drove that idle thought out of his head, and he could feel a grin spread across his face. “Poe Dameron!”

“Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?” Poe reached one hand out, grasped the other man’s shoulder. Finn ducked his head sheepishly, and Poe couldn’t stop himself. “Best thing I’ve seen all day.”

A blush spread across Finn’s face. “Shut up.”

“Nope, won’t.” Poe pulled Finn closer to him. “Missed you at breakfast. PT?”

“Yeah,” Finn relaxed just a hair, stopped trying to hide the smile on his face. “It’s going all right, I mean, it’s boring, but it’s helping. Barely needed this thing today.” He nodded down at his walking stick. “Anyway, came to tell you that Pava wants you.”

“Funny, I want to talk to Pava.” Poe squeezed Finn’s shoulder hard, just once, a promise for later. “She in the mess?”

“Yeah. BB-8’s back in my quarters, resting. Want her?”

“No, no, she’s fine with you. Have her show you some vids, yeah?”

“The Poe Dameron Failure Files?” Finn grinned then, wicked and happy, and Poe didn’t stop himself from leaning forward and pressing their lips together.

“Yes,” he said, when they broke apart with only a little gasping. “The Poe Dameron Failure Files, Volume Three: that time I tried to fly an A-wing on radar only and ended up, well, you’ll see.”

Finn’s free hand had come up to grasp Poe’s elbow during the kiss. He gave it a squeeze now, a goodbye and a see you later in one.

Poe strode off, took a few steps, then turned around. “You said the mess, right?”

Finn laughed so loudly he didn’t hear Poe swear at him in binary.

* * *

No matter what planet the Resistance was holed up on at the time, the mess was always dark, always close quarters, and always smelled like day-old vegetable stew. With all the different races and species in the fleet, vegetable stew had been quickly seized upon as the least likely food to kill or offend anyone, so that was what they almost always had to offer. It was also cheap and infinitely customizable based on what they could forage and grow themselves wherever they were based. If they won this war, and Poe believed that they would, it would be on the strength of a million vegetables grown on a dozen wildly different planets, all turned into soft brown stew.

The problem for Poe was that he hated it. Well, he hadn’t hated it initially. He’d had more than his fair share of bad mess hall slop in the Academy and then on the front for a while. He had at first welcomed the rich vegetables, the hearty stew, the warmth. When he’d been briefly stationed on Derenath, a hellish ice planet in the middle of a bunch of other equally hellish planets, the warmth had made him love it. But not for long. Poe had been raised with a brilliant, opinionated mother and a clever, creative father, and the food in his house had been nothing like the brown stew with whatever vegetables thrown in. He missed spices, he missed color, he missed texture. He missed good food, food that was fun and exciting, food that was more than just warmth and calories to keep him going.

Finn and Rey, of course, had no such qualms. He’d caught both of them stealing extra freeze-dried stew rations and big hunks of bread and whatever portable fruit they could find, tucking them in their robes and stashing them in their rooms. That they both did it told him more about Finn than about Rey - he’d seen Jakku for himself, knew the scarcity she’d grown up in. Knew, too, that she’d not been a food thief before. Her, he’d given a firm lecture, all about honesty and not stealing. “There will always be food here for you,” he’d said, moving his head to meet her eyes. “You don’t have to steal it. You don’t have to pay for it, either, but please don’t steal it. If you’re hungry, come to the mess. They’ll always feed you. I promise.” That’d stopped her stealing, he thought, although she’d shortly left on that mission to find Luke Skywalker, so he couldn’t take much credit.

Finn had been different. Poe knew on some level that the First Order used food as punishment, as bribery, as a brainwashing tool. He wasn’t stupid, he watched the holovids, he read the reports from the Resistance’s spies. What he hadn’t realized, because he’d never thought about it, was that “food” to the First Order was nothing like food to any thinking being to begin with. When he’d confronted Finn gently about the stealing, the story that had burst forth was nothing like what he’d expected.

It wasn’t just that soldiers who didn’t succeed didn’t eat, or that rations were cut at random to keep everyone on edge, or that three days’ starvation was a common punishment for the smallest infraction. It was that even when they did get to eat (never as much as they wanted, never enough to feel full), they ate either flavorless protein blocks or flavorless protein slop. The blocks, Finn had explained with a dead voice that made Poe ache to hear, were worse. They were hard as bricks and took ages to eat. The few First Order soldiers who weren’t being punished for anything got no more than fifteen minutes’ feeding time twice a day, and it was nearly impossible to get the block soft enough to eat in that time. Finn had haltingly described the methods First Order soldiers used. “You could try to break the block up, but they were just the wrong size to do that. Some of us tried to crumble them, or crush them, but they just…smooshed, gave a tiny bit, and you’d put your whole weight on it but nothing happened.” And then, he’d explained, you were punished for playing with your food instead of eating it. The slop was better, as it was at least swallowable, but it was always served either near-frozen or boiling hot. “Hot slop was a small punishment,” Finn had said, “not as bad as starvation, because you’d burn your mouth and hands trying to eat it.” Oh, there was that, too: the First Order didn’t offer utensils.

Poe hadn’t had the heart to lecture him about the stealing after that. “If you need to take something to feel safe, you can do that, okay? But you don’t—I mean, there will always be food here. You can always come eat, and you can take your time. You don’t have to wait for when everyone else is eating, there’ll at least be bread and fruit here any time you come. I promise, you can eat whatever you need, whenever you need to. Okay?”

Finn had nodded, but Poe was pretty sure he still had a stash of bread and fruit and freeze-dried stew under his bed. He still ate like someone might take his bowl away. He still seemed so wondrous, so grateful for the bare minimum, so overwhelmed by the possibility of more. It made Poe ache.

Today, though, what mattered to him wasn’t the smell of brown stew or the darkness, the closeness, the way the mess always seemed smaller on the inside than it really should. What mattered to Poe was the slight, dark-haired woman playing (probably cheating) four other pilots in a game. Poe was pretty sure they were playing Horansi, or something like it if the seven red dice and two different decks of cards were anything to go by. If it was Horansi or a variant, the other pilots had to have been especially drunk or stupid to let Pava play, since she’d always beaten the pants off of every Outer Rim smuggler in every bar they’d visited.

“You letting Pava cheat you?” He clapped Bastian on the back, grinned at the other pilots. “Stupid of you.”

“She’s losing, Commander, we’re fine.” Snap’s normally tight-wound expression looked relaxed and open, which was probably why Pava chose that moment to destroy him.

“Three and out, children. I’ll take those, thank you.” She scooped up the counters they used to bet with a wide grin while her fellow pilots groaned and complained.

Poe laughed. “Told you, didn’t I? Don’t play cards with Pava if you don’t want to lose hot water for a week.” He shook a finger at her in mock anger. “Selfish, you.”

The smaller woman shrugged, her wide grin unwavering. “I’m not going to keep all of them, Commander. I’ll divvy them out for favors, like always.” She shot Snap, the loudest complainer, a wink. “If Snap asks nice, I might even forget to tell his wife he lost all his hot water for the month.”

“Can I speak to you alone?” Poe said in a low voice, just enough that Pava caught it under the noisy complaints and jokes. “My quarters, soon as you’re free?”

“Yes, sir, of course, sir.” She glanced down at her arms full of hot water tokens. “If it’s about the—“

Poe made a face at her. “Like I care. No, this is something else. Sensitive, you hear?”

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.” She gave the sharp nod they used in lieu of a salute most days and watched Poe walk away. The groans and complaining had turned to wheedling, trying to get into her good graces and get their hot water back.

* * *

Jessika Pava stopped by her quarters to drop off the hot water counters. The box in which she kept her winnings was already nearly full; she should really start giving them away. Poe Dameron’s boyfriend deserved a few long, hot showers, probably. She sought the comfort of thinking about his face lit up in that smile, but found nothing. _No joy for you here, Pava_ , she thought. Her emotions were drained, strangely empty, and she knew that it was the feeling, the strange compulsion threatening to come again. She closed her eyes and sat wrapped in on herself on her cot, the way her mother had sat in meditation. She took deep, slow, even breaths, and waited. It would come soon, and she would do or say the thing that was necessary, and she quelled the fear that screamed at her to run, to hide, to fight back. The feeling didn’t cause her any lasting harm, not really, not from a certain point of view. It hurt in the moment but faded once she obeyed, and so she hopped to it fast enough almost every time. She should have expected it now, tonight, so long since the last time (a flash of loathing in her, that bar on Rhommamool, that sick sensation of wanting a quiet end and an endless darkness). It came unpredictably, but always returned, just when she thought it had gone.

At the Academy, they had tested her for Force sensitivity, as they tested all pilots. She’d been found to have nothing more than the usual, reflexes a bit faster than usual, maybe a hint of foresight, but nothing like this. This hadn’t shown up on the tests, despite her trying to hard to make it happen so someone else would know, would see, so she would be free of the burden of it. Instead, it had only grown slowly, carefully, over time, and she wasn’t sure now if it had always been this painful and powerful and merely unearthed itself more over time or if it had truly developed stronger as she got older. She knew, regardless, that there had come a moment when she had realized what it was and why, when she tried to ignore it, she felt nauseated and tired and hurt all over. The Force was powerful, and its will would not be ignored lightly. Perhaps that’s what Jedi knights actually learned back in the old days: how to ignore the Force, how to shape it to their own wants, not to be pushed around by it. For one sharp, shining moment, she had seen herself in a Jedi robe, wielding a lightsaber, commanding the Force, but the robe and lightsaber were as a child would draw them, and her best conception of commanding the Force was something out of an old holovid, and the hope in that vision faded. _No hero stories, Pava_ , her thoughts told her.

With it came the compulsion, and she was up and out of her room before her next breath. Whatever happened next would be the will of the Force, and her breathing would shudder and her joints would ache. She would be injured, maybe, but nothing too severe, something she could wave away as clumsiness or drunkenness, and the important thing was that the Force would leave her alone for a while after it was done. The compulsion would ebb back out of her mind, out of her limbs, and let her be as close to a whole person as possible for a few days, a week, a month or two. The pain, the nausea, the loss of control: they all hurt, all stung, all loitered around in her soul afterwards. But she had made the bargain, had made the choice at the beginning, and it wouldn’t do her any good to start fighting it now. The respite from the Force, the power of the Force’s will, this almost-a-Jedi-in-ways existence, this chance to help, they had to be worth all of this, didn’t they? At least a little?

* * *

Afterwards, aching and sick to her stomach, not quite sure what she had done or for (or to) whom, she straggled up to Dameron’s door. Knocked loudly. She’d learned that lesson before, burst in on the two of them without meaning to, embarrassed Finn more than her or Poe, but she knocked now. They all did. Relearned some semblance of privacy after the gods only knew how long in the Academy and on the run, and it was nice, in a way. To knock. To have this division of personal life again, like they were all their own people and all individual. Fragmentation always sounded bad, Pava knew, but it could help sometimes.

“Come in,” Poe called through the door, shattered Pava’s reverie.

“You wanted to see me, sir,” she hid her hands behind her back. One wrist felt off, stiff, as if she’d torn something, and that’d be a bitch to explain to the med droids; her shoulders ached, too, and she thought she felt cool air seeping through a tear in her tunic, but she’d need time to figure it out. Time to map the damage she’d done to herself, match it to damage done elsewhere, find the path the Force had dragged her along, and make whatever amends were needed. The time spent cleaning up after the Force was time she resented, always, her whole life, and if that resentment came with the flavor of penance, of working off a debt she didn’t remember accruing to a lender she didn’t know for an amount she’d never been told, well.

“The General wants to see you, actually, but I wanted to—“ Poe broke off. “You all right, Pava? You look pale.”

She flexed her toes, hidden in her flight boots, in lieu of shaking the thoughts out of her head. Pasted on a sardonic smile. Snorted. “Yeah, mother, I’m fine.” _Careful, Pava_ , but Poe just smiled, shook one finger at her like a character in a holo. “Sorry, sir, just tired. From the recon with Oddy, you know.”

“How’d that go?”

Pava gave a one-shoulder shrug. “Same as always. Base looks abandoned. There’s a good-size boma colony on the other side of the salt sea, but they shouldn’t cross over until the next migration. Oddy thinks that might happen during the next orbit, a few cycles from now, and then we’d have six or seven seasons to build before we’d need to be safe from the things coming back the other way.”

“We’d need a moat, some reinforcements,” Poe scribbled notes on a pad. “I’ll get Oddy’s report, he’ll have the atmo readings. I expect your formal report before the end of the week, unless the General gives you something else to do.”

“Why’s she want to see me, sir?”

Poe looked up. “I have no idea, Pava. Keep yourself safe. Trust your gut, will you? And get me that report if you can.” He dipped back down, hid his face in the cloud of his hair, said no more.

She could hear what he wasn’t saying, clear as a bell, and she knew when she’d been dismissed. “Sir.”

* * *

The General looked up from her map-strewn desk. “Ah, you must be Pava.”

“Yes, sir.” Pava snapped her sharpest salute, stood at her straightest attention, and tried very hard to swallow down the nervous excitement that always bubbled up in her when the General was around. Her arms ached from whatever the compulsion had had her do. She thought, given the particular way her wrist ached and the grease she’d found under her nails, it might have had something to do with a fighter, and she would have feared sabotage if it hadn’t felt more like she’d done something helpful. The feeling never let her really know what had happened, not for a while anyway. The salute hadn’t helped her wrist hurt any less.

“They call you ‘Testor,’ is that right?”

Pava made a gesture that, had Prindel been around, would have read as slight discomfort, maybe sheepishness. “In the Academy they did, sir. Not so much here. I mostly use Pava.”

“I’ve noticed that the pilots have started using last names more than nicknames,” the General mused as she examined one of half a dozen screens on her desk. “Or even first names, for that matter. Anyone call you Jessika?”

The flush that crept up on Pava’s face could have heated half the base. “No, uh, no sir. Not in…professional settings, sir.”

For a moment the General looked almost confused, but then it clicked. “Ah. Personal situations, then?” The barest hint of a wicked grin.

“Sir, yes, sir.” _Oh goddess, let me melt into the floor and disappear._

“I suppose I’ll stick with calling you Pava, then.”

“Yes, sir.” A flood of relief. “Thank you, sir.”

“You know why you’re here?”

“Sir, no sir. Commander Dameron didn’t say, sir.” He’d instead, she didn’t say, given her a very cryptic warning, or at least it had felt that way. _You’re saying ‘sir’ too much, Pava_.

“My brother — do you know my brother?”

“Luke Skywalker, sir?” _Tread carefully, Pava._ “Yes, sir. He’s a Jedi. Maybe the last, sir. Disappeared a decade or so ago.” Pava took a deep breath. What she knew of the General, of who the General had been once, made her want so much to break the tension. What she knew of the General now made her terrified to joke. _Now or never, Pava_. “Supposed to be a damn fine pilot, too,” a hasty addition, “begging your pardon, sir.”

At that, a laugh burst from the General, and Pava could see the Leia from the stories, the warrior princess, the crack shot, the rebellious schemer. Still there, still laughing, under the responsibility and heartbreak. “He is that. Also an idiot, but the stories don’t usually mention that part.” The General leaned back in her chair, propped heavy leather boots atop her heavy metal desk. “Don’t mind that, Pava, and sit down, you make my feet hurt. A little sibling humor.”

Pava replied almost without thinking, “I’m the fourth of seven girls, sir, I’m quite familiar with sibling humor.”

“Fourth of seven, eh? Your parents were brave.”

“Brave, foolhardy, and outnumbered, sir.”

Another laugh from the General. “What are your sisters’ names?”

The automatic answer spilled out before Pava could stop herself. “Ana, Maia, Saphria, then me, then Zamira and Aleia. Zamira and Aleia are twins, sir. Then Rabbit — sorry, Radvita, the baby.”

A rueful shake of her head. “Any of them idiots?”

“Sir?”

“Never mind, Pava, just thinking aloud. My brother, who is an idiot no matter what the stories say, has some damn fool plan to stay hidden on that planet he thinks we can’t find.”

“Yes, sir.” _Remember, Pava, measured steps._

The General sat forward, focused all the power in her gaze on Pava. “I want him here, helping us. And safe, where we can see him. Where I can see him, I should say.”

A sharp lance of pain struck Pava, emanating not from herself but from the General. Pava hadn’t known Solo as anything more than a legend, but the General’s sorrow had been so bright and clear that the whole base felt it when it spiked. Pava had cried out in her fighter, had pushed it away, hadn’t thought about it until later. The Force connected all living things, she knew, but it seemed that it connected some more strongly than others. “Yes, sir.”

The General was silent for a moment. “Anyway, Pava, you’re Force-sensitive, yes?”

Pava hedged. “They tested me at the Academy, sir. Mildly Force-sensitive, no more than most pilots in the fleet.”

Even in her wildest dreams, the ones where they were best friends and played cards all night, Pava had never anticipated that she would hear General Leia Organa snort and call, “Bullshit,” but life proved itself strange all the time.

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Bullshit, I said. You’re more sensitive to it than Dameron, for sure. More than anyone I’ve met in a long time. That’s why you’re here. I need that.”

“Sir, I—”

One hand held up. “Find my brother, Pava, and the girl, too, on that island or mountain or wherever he’s sequestered them. Tell him to stop being an idiot for once in his idiot life and come here and help me. Don’t frogmarch him or kidnap the girl, but make a good case. I’m sending holos from me and a few other people he used to listen to, those may help. No hard deadline, but bring them back soon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dameron has your orders.” A hand waved toward the door. “Dismissed, Pava.”

“Thank you, sir.” Pava stood, snapped the best salute she’d ever give in her life, even better than the one she’d given when she’d walked in, and turned to leave. Paused. “Sir, if I may?”

“What?” The General, immersed in bureaucracy again, didn’t look up.

“How did you know I was Force-sensitive?”

At that, the General peered over the edge of a mission update. Her eyes looked, suddenly, so much older and stranger, as if they had seen lifetimes go by in sorrow. “Didn’t you know, Pava? The Force is strong in my family.” Looked back at the report. “Dismissed.”

* * *

“What’s up, Pava?” Prindel dropped her tray on the table, within inches of the pilot’s head.

Pava made a gesture that aimed for exhaustion and anxiety. “I’m going on a mission for the General.”

Prindel’s return gesture was a little confused, a little encouraging. “Not a good mission?”

Uncertainty, more exhaustion, some despair.

Sarcasm, and Prindel replied, “My name’s Pava and I’m mad that I get a super secret important mission from the godsdamned General herself.”

A touch of despair, some frustration. “Shut it, Prindel.”

Gentle teasing, affection. “What’s wrong with the mission?”

“I have to go try and get Luke Skywalker to come fight for the Resistance.” A gesture for not kidding around, for not joking.

A long moment of silence, then a gesture that bordered on obscene and translated roughly into _yeah, good luck with that_.

“I know, right?” Pava turned her head so that her face was pressed flat into the table top.

Prindel ate some stew thoughtfully. Let the silence hang. Rapped her spoon on the table to get Pava to turn her head back, to look. “Does it make it better or worse that Rey is with him? You’ll get to see her, which would be nice, right?”

“Yeah, until I turn into a gibbering idiot and also fail at the mission and get to wave bye as I lift off and leave them there and come back to the frowny-face General of my childhood nightmares, so.”

Acquiescence. “No sense worrying about it, then, since you know what’s going to happen. Might as well get drunk.”

“Oh, goddess, yes please.”

They ended up in Snap’s quarters. His wife, out on a supply run, had the best stash of Sullustan wine this side of Cloud City, and had long ago given Prindel free reign with it. Prindel, who always replaced it, had in turn given Pava a strict “not without me” rule, and Snap was allowed to sit in if he didn’t speak and refilled glasses as needed. Prindel ran a tight ship.

“Snap, you’re married, how’d you get a gorgeous perfect lady like Ta'akka to marry you? She’s awesome.” Pava downed the last swallow of her glass.

As Snap leaned over to fill it up, he chuckled. “She is awesome, you’re right. She’s smarter than me, not like it’s hard, and she’s an incredible pilot, and she’s sexy as hell, and I have no idea why she married me.”

“You could ask me in person,” a liquid voice called from the hall.

“Baby!” Snap leapt up and very nearly didn’t fall down. “You’re back!”

“Hey, sweetheart,” Ta’akka Wexley (originally from Glee Anselm, now ace recon pilot for the west fourteenth quadrant), cooed. She kissed Snap soundly, then pushed him down to a seated position. “Hey, Prindel.” Prindel got a kiss, too, and Pava did as well. “Darling Pava, how are you, honey?”

“Drunk, Tak, so drunk.”

Prindel nodded, too large of a gesture, too much, because of the wine. “She’s so drunk, Tak, but she’s also so in love.”

“Not in love, not in love-love, shut up, I don’t love her, I just—“

“The desert girl? The one with the,” Ta'akka made a gesture like swinging a staff. “She’s beautiful, Pava, good choice.”

“She’s not, I’m not, I mean,” Pava downed some more wine. “I just like her, is all.”

“I can’t be having with deserts,” Ta’akka clucked, sounded like nothing so much as Pava’s long-dead grandmother. “Sand gets everywhere, a body dies parched. No good.”

“Yeah, me too,” Prindel nodded, gave a gesture of homesickness. “Give me a shallow pond and shade trees.”

“I don’t mind the desert,” Snap said softly. “Easy to see things coming.”

“Oh goddess, who even cares?” The wine, as it always did, had turned on Pava. “Snap, you like deserts ‘cause you grew up on a jungle planet, and you’re paranoid. Tak, you only hate deserts ‘cause you’re a Nautolan. Prindel, who the hell knows, your people aren’t even named in Basic. Me, I’m human, I couldn’t give two shits about the planet type someone’s from, just, you know, I like her. Don’t talk shit about desert people, is all I’m saying.”

“All right, Pava’s getting offended by stupid things, time to cut you all off.” Ta’akka smiled kindly. “Go home, girls, sleep it out of your systems. You,” she pointed to Snap. “Report to bed for a debrief immediately.”

He snapped a clean salute, no small feat in his state, and marched off toward their sleeping quarters.

Prindel made a gesture of apology and thanks toward Ta’akka as she shuffled Pava out.

* * *

“That went well,” Pava said, head in hands. Her bunk, Prindel’s across the room, the shaded window with a view of the hangar: all were hidden by her own hands, her hair, her shame.

Prindel hummed to herself, quietly, the way she did when she was upset.

“I’m sorry, Prindel, I really am.” Pava looked up, blinked hard. “I’ll apologize to Tak, too, and Snap. I’m really sorry.”

The gesture Prindel gave was something about forgiveness and understanding, _I know this is hard for you_ , but Pava’s tears clouded her eyes again and she couldn’t read it clearly. The full-wrap of a hug, though, that was clear as day.

As she clambered aboard the ship to where-the-hells-ever the General was sending her, she looked back over her shoulder. Poe, Finn, BB-8, the rest of the squadron, Prindel, and the General, too, all looking at her. Looking like she carried more than an empty ship and a few holos, more than the necessary supplies and a good-sized cask of Tak’s best wine. Like she carried hope. A new chance, an unbroken promise. _Maybe this is what the Jedi felt like_ , and then another step into the ship, and the doors slid shut, and she was alone with her thoughts and the Force and the vast nothingness to come.


	2. they mistake tension for poise

The flight there was simple. Or, not simple, because it was a circuitous route, at speeds far too slow for Pava’s taste, on the _Mercator_ , a craft way too big and too unwieldy (because of passenger space, because of hope), going nowhere near anywhere interesting. Uneventful wasn’t truly the right word either, because it implied nothing of import happened on the flight, when in fact Pava could name half a dozen ridiculous, weird, amazing things that happened. They were just spread out, is all, punctuation marks in a long sentence of quiet and stillness and watching the same holo half a hundred times. So maybe boring, a boring flight there. The General had, in what Pava was certain was a display of twisted humor, offered to put her on a civilian transport with an RX pilot droid, get her there a lot faster if she cryoslept and let the droid drive. At Pava’s horrified protests, the General had laughed until she’d had to sit down. That had given Pava a warmth in her stomach, to see the warrior princess general laugh like a child. The warmth had leached away when, presented with the _Mercator_ and its astromech maintenance droid, R3-M5, neither one felt even the slightest bit welcoming. Her binary wasn’t nearly as sharp as Dameron’s, but it was good enough to know that the greeting message R3 gave was so blunt as to be rude, and that once the General was out of earshot Pava was subjected to the droid equivalent of muttering curses under one’s breath. The _Mercator_ , too, was old, and not old in an interesting way like an antique or a throwback model. Just old, something Pava’s dad might well have boarded to steal from in his younger days, and not a scrap of unusual or unique design to be had. A half-decent games table, a mediocre engine system, and honestly the least visually interesting readouts Pava’d seen this side of her grandmother’s kitchen HUD back home.

Then the takeoff was rocky, a shimmy just annoying enough that it bothered Pava more than it strictly should have, and then there was a weird asteroid field that hadn’t been marked on their maps, and Pava could sense through the filth that cluttered R3’s chatter that the droid really wanted to go figure out why the debris was there instead of just reporting it and moving on. Pava had tried to commiserate over that, a little me-too to build a bond, because it was super strange and the back of her neck itched with already nearly unbearable desire to Do Something, but R3 had reacted…poorly. Pava had tried to keep to herself after that. They had six more weeks of travel at least, three more before they even got to a good stopping place - and not even a really good one, some little swampy forest moon, just a refuel and dropping off some confidential data to an informant, a dead drop, they wouldn’t even get to meet the spy. “This whole mission sucks,” Pava announced to the empty corridor. If she strained, she could just hear R3 muttering to herself. “Her” was an educated guess, based on the particular way R3 spoke binary and a few hints the droid had given, plus a sort of feeling Pava had picked up. She’d been around enough droids to get some inkling of how some of them chose to process or present gender. R3 felt like, if she had been human, she would have identified somewhat female. If they’d been friends or even friendly, Pava could have asked (it wasn’t considered rude to ask droids their preferred pronouns, because it was always a guess otherwise), but not—

A shock rocked the ship. Pava was thrown against the side of the corridor, her shoulder screamed with pain, she shouted, “R3!”

The little droid had screeched at the movement, and started to spit invective and collision information in long strings of binary over the fuzzy comms. Pava clutched her shoulder and swore, scrunched eyes shut until she could catch her breath. “Shit, shit, oh goddess, help me,” she heard herself speaking aloud as she ran, bouncing back and forth as the ship continued to shudder wildly. R3’s chatter grew louder, more profane, and also more helpful as the droid angrily diagnosed the particular issue the coupler had developed. One of them should have caught it earlier, R3 seemed to think, because of the issues they’d both noticed on takeoff, but where Pava had expected blame, the droid instead seemed to feel equally guilty.

“Sorry, R3, we’ll get this, do the isolation procedures,” Pava yelled. She dropped below the deck and grabbed the casing from the faulty part. “I’ll get the fucker out and we can drift for a while until we rewire it, copy?”

An affirmative whistle and a horrific string of profanity made Pava smile, even though her shoulder was going numb. Whatever she’d hit in the initial shake had done something bad, and there wasn’t time to work on it. “R3! I’ve got the thing off, get the thing!” _Oh, goddess, Pava, use words_. “The thing! That, the red—“ R3 had, somehow, figured out what particular thing Pava was thinking of, gesturing helplessly at despite being out of sight, because it dropped solidly on the panel beneath her. “OK, OK! Wait for my signal, then cut power, ready?”

Another affirmative whistle.

Pava pulled hard, got the faulty coupler out, and yelled, “Got it, R3! Cut power!”

The ship died around them. Life support and grav would stay on for a while, plus a very soft signaling beacon so they didn’t get run over by anyone, but it was going to be cold and quiet until they got this fixed. R3 muttered something about battery life. It wasn’t livid, the tone of her chatter, but almost edging into scared. Pava nearly smiled, thinking of how, if R3 was humanoid, her face just now would look almost frighteningly like Dameron’s after a bonehead maneuver that, while it totally worked, was way the hell too dangerous to just spring on everyone. She really ought to introduce them when she got back, if she could. They’d either murder each other or, as her mother would say, get on like a house on fire. “Thanks, R3, you’re a genius.” Pava pulled herself up with one arm, her numb shoulder radiating pain out and down her left arm. “Here, rip this thing apart, I’ll go see if we’ve got a spare to keep us up.”

An angry whistle, but a good one, almost laughing, pissed off but smiling anyway. Then, and Pava couldn’t have explained how, R3’s body language totally changed. R3 extended a grabber, poked at Pava’s messed-up shoulder. It had been almost numb, but the poke seemed somehow to be aimed perfectly at the center of whatever had happened. A flare of pain. Pava winced away, sucked in a breath. <Stupid idiot human>, Pava got that much before R3 sped up and got less and less translatable. The rest of what sounded, in all honesty, like one of her mother’s lectures, was something about the Maker and organic beings and how their hardware was far too soft, just inherently inferior. The undercurrent, though, was something about concern, something about worry. Just a hint, but it was there.

“It’s fine, R3, I’ll look at it in a minute. I just banged it.” _She cares, Pava_ , but no time for that now.

* * *

The spare coupler pretty much fit. Well, except that one angle. “This one must have been the previous gen, stupid remodels. Hey, R3, do we have the big spanner? The blue one?”

R3-M5 whistled annoyance, as always. She rocked back and forth a few times, used a pincer claw to hand Pava the requested tool, and sped away, ranting to herself about <stupid humans> and their penchant for percussive maintenance.

“Why’s my droid the mean one?” Pava asked the coupler as she rolled it over in her hands, decided exactly where to beat the shit out of it so it’d fit. “Poe gets the sweetest BB unit, the General gets the duffer and the legend, and I get a mean little astromech with a temper and no interest at all in being more helpful than the bare minimum. Not fair, you know?” The coupler, finally fitted neatly as long as no one noticed the huge dent on one side, didn’t respond, and Pava heaved a sigh. Her shoulder still hurt, although R3 had bullied her into at least promising to do a scan of it once they got power back. “R3? Try her now, okay?”

The droid beeped - <doing something really fucking dangerous and stupid now, hold your breath, you worthless organism> \- and then whirred quietly, almost a prayer. The ship flickered and stuttered, then roared back to life. Warmth and light flooded the corridors, and Pava’s shoulder started to ease up, unclench. R3’s triumphant whistle was so loud over the comms that Pava nearly fell laughing.

“We want to run a couple of diagnostics, R3, right? Make sure we’re not about to explode?”

R3 reminded Pava of the shoulder thing, and that R3 was <about four hundred times smarter and faster than some puny human>, plus she never hurt her shoulder because she didn’t have shoulders, <because, thank the Maker, I’m not organic like you losers>.

“I could argue that, I mean, you’ve got joints, so,“ Pava thought better of it. “Yeah, okay, run the usual suite plus some engine checks. And a fuel check, I don’t have any idea if we leaked anything. And—“ R3 said something that, in Basic, would have gotten her kicked out of even a rathole like Mos Eisley. “Shit, R3, sorry, okay, I’ll get off your tail.” Pava grinned, and something slotted neatly into place. She felt almost like she was hollering insults across the kitchen at her sisters, like they were arguing about any of a dozen old family stories. It was nice. Comforting. _What does it say, Pava, that you find a droid chewing your out to be comforting?_

 _Mercator’_ s tiny, thoroughly stocked but wildly unimpressive medical suite beeped at her to get up, she was done, scan complete. Pava rolled her arm around a couple of times, feeling the numbness spread from the injection site. The shoulder was fine. Or, not fine, but not going to kill her. She sent a scan back to base anyway, and was sure that the response would be to take it easy and stay hydrated. She’d done a lot worse a lot faster a lot of times, so a jammed shoulder and some scrapes didn’t pose any real issue. The issue was, instead, how to kill time for another three weeks. _More holos of The Last Jedi, then, Pava?_ The five she’d loaded onto the shipboard server were the best of the lot, in her opinion, but she’d memorized them as a child and seen them so many times since that she could play them on the insides of her eyelids. Poe had handed her a few hard discs of some Yavin IV melodramas, which were far more entertaining since they were all love stories. But she’d seen those too many times as well. Plus Poe’s taste ran hard into star-crossed royalty meets the beautiful peasant variety, which was fine but definitely not Pava’s thing. She had always more preferred the adventure serials where the dashing hero and the brave warrior stood back-to-back against a sea of oncoming evil. Of course, nowadays Poe was the one with a steady boyfriend and Pava was the one pining after a near stranger, so who even knew anymore?

The ship felt empty. It wasn’t, not with R3, but it felt that way. Pava had grown more used than she’d realized to the cramped and loud living quarters of the base. She wandered for a bit, tightened a few things, polished the mirror in the tiny head. Drank some arrack she had stowed in her personal locker. Popped back down to the banged-up coupler to make sure it wasn’t on fire, which it wasn’t. Double-checked all the scans R3 had run, and reran a couple just because. Took care of some private pleasure. Finally she found herself outside the little closet where R3 usually hung out when not running the ship or beeping angrily at Pava. She knocked twice, waited. Nothing.

“Hey R3, I know you won’t, but want to play Dejarik?”

A long silence hung in the air, and then the little astromech peeked out. Her whistle was still full of annoyance, but there was a hesitant agreement there, too. The game took about seven minutes, and Pava had never lost so decisively.

“Again?” They played four more, and R3 won every one, and by the end of the fifth match Pava had laughed herself out of her chair and R3 was whistling in triumph, not anger. The droid sped away almost crowing, <winner winner replicator dinner>, and Pava walked back to her bed feeling less alone than she had since liftoff. She lay one one side, slightly curled up, massaged her shoulder until she drifted off, smiling, to sleep.

The next waking period, Pava taught R3 how to play Shronker, and won the first two matches handily. Then R3 got the hang of it and Pava was, again, whipped soundly and with ease. “You’re very good at strategy games, R3, aren’t you?”

A whistle of smug satisfaction.

“You know Mahaa’i Shuur? Or, what would you call it in Basic, Ultimate Success?” At the droid’s negative whistle, Pava let a smuggler’s grin sneak over her face. “Oh, R3, you’re going to love this. Let me go get the cards.”

The rest of the trip was still boring, but Pava and R3 traded hands of Ultimate Success and Pava learned to lose slightly less horrifically in all of the strategy hologames on the ship’s table, and slow but sure R3 stopped calling her <worthless bag of meat>. The little droid still called her stupid and slow much of the time, but with a whistle that was more like a laugh than a curse. It worked for Pava, who’d never had an astromech friend of her own, and she figured that being prickly and too smart must be a hard life for a droid. It’d been hard enough for a couple of her sisters, and they weren’t even expected to be cold hard automatons. At least, not in a literal sense.

They did stop, briefly, planet-side, on a little world covered with trees and mud. R3 hated it, <this mushy brown bullshit hangs up my wheels, why’s the fucking air wet, where’s the Maker-damned sky>, and Pava loved it (it felt almost like home, like rice and stew and too many sisters) but they only needed some rations and a fiddly bit of wire. Also they dropped a data packet in a hollow tree like they lived in that old-timey holo about kids solving mysteries, which Pava pulled up to show R3 as they sauntered casually back to the market. They picked up a new coupler while they were there - the banged-up spare was working okay but Pava had gotten kind of paranoid about it. R3 had, too, although she’d never admit it. Pava knew that more than once, when she’d wandered carelessly down to just happen to check on it, no reason at all, the droid had been moseying away from with with a careful air of nonchalance. <What a coincidence,> R3 would whistle, or Pava would make a tiny expression of confusion and shock. They were the both of them pretty decent liars, not that anyone watching would’ve been able to tell.

They tried four different merchants, each with every coupler model on either side of the one they needed but absolutely none of theirs. The goddess-damned coupler was cursed, Pava decided. When they finally found a merchant who had one, he was a big humanoid with a nasty look to him, leered at Pava and ignored R3 altogether, like she wasn’t even there. R3 complained loudly that they were being overcharged, which they were, and Pava had to step in to keep the man from bashing her, and it all took time. And the one they got was clearly used, nowhere near the quality the oily man had claimed, but Pava didn’t want to fight him about it, so she overruled R3’s rage and got the little astromech out of there before something happened. She’d never seen an astromech get into a brawl before, but if any droid could do it, R3 would be the one. Frankly, R3 would probably win, too, and then they’d be in for even more of a world of hurt. They ended up spending the night on-world, in a little round hut under the trees. R3 didn’t rest at all, kept whirring to herself, kept doing the droid equivalent of pacing.

“You prefer being on the ship, huh?”

A corrective whistle.

“Shut up, R3, it’s one night. You’re a tough broad, you can do one night on-world, can’t you?” _Goading her, Pava?_

A rude whistle, an obscene gesture, maybe just the barest hint of a laugh.

“Well, if you won’t sleep, I sure as hell can’t. I didn’t bring the cards. Wanna play evens and odds?” The child’s game proved just soothing enough that R3 stopped rolling around in circles, stopped swearing, but not enough that she rested. Instead they set the ship on autopilot the next morning and Pava convinced R3 to shut down for a while. The droid woke up in a much better mood and proceeded to destroy Pava at a children’s puzzle game they’d found in a storage block. Things settled back in.

Some days later, R3’s whistle echoed down a corridor to Pava, half-asleep. Her whistle was still rude, still an insult, but with a tone very near affectionate. “Yeah, I’m up, I’m up,” Pava yelled back. Her shoulder ached just enough that she remembered to favor it a little. The scans showed everything healing up fine, and Pava had been bullied and pushed by R3 into wrapping it up for a few days to stabilize it a little better. Things were all right. She pulled on her cleanest uniform, because if her math was right she knew just what she would see out the screens in the cockpit.

Pava held her breath like she’d never been on a ship as she walked in. The world swung into view, all blue and calm, and Pava could feel her nerves start to jangle. R3 must have sensed it, because she scooted a little closer to Pava. She didn’t lean on her like the General’s droid would have, or extend a comforting limb like Poe’s, but Pava knew good and well that consciously choosing to be closer to a human was as good as a declaration for R3. Pava hid a grin. “OK, R3, take us down, if you’d like.” Pava rested one hand softly, tentatively, on the astromech’s dome, fingertips just brushing the worn metal. “Thanks, really, you’ve done an outstanding job. Want to come on-world?”

No rude whistle, but a rude gesture, and Pava laughed her way down the steps.

* * *

When she reached the world below, she stopped laughing. Mouth dropped open. Eyes widened. A gasp, and a crowing, “Oh goddess, am I seeing this?” She ran across choppy rocks toward the battered ship, ran like a child. If the Force guided her feet, she didn’t feel it, but she didn’t fall, either. “It’s the _Millennium Falcon_ ,” she shouted to no one, her joy spilling out into the open air. At her cry, seabirds flew away, up into the sky with its twin suns and not a cloud to be seen. “Holy shit,” she whispered to herself as she reached one hand out. She shouldn’t touch it, it was like those stone relics she’d glimpsed in the flyover, like a hot stove, like a prayer cloth hanging in a temple, like a girl too good for her. “Hello, gorgeous.” She couldn’t not touch it, for all the same reasons. It felt warm, no doubt from the suns, but for a fleeting moment she let herself believe that it was really alive, that it was happy to meet her, too.

“And hello to you, too,” a voice called from behind her.

Pava spun, crouched already into a fighting stance. When she saw who was speaking, she couldn’t stop a high hopeful laugh from bubbling out of her. “Rey! Hey, hi, sorry, we tried to tell you I was coming but the Falcon wouldn’t—“

“It’s turned off, makes it harder to track, hi, how are you—“

“Sorry, yes, hi, I’m fine, I’m good, there’s an astromech on the _Mercator_ you should meet, you’ll—“

“Master Luke’s up at the house, or not a house but the shelter, and R2 and Chewie are somewhere—“

They were face-to-face, having hopped rocks toward each other while talking simultaneously, ever louder even as they got closer to each other. Pava could have, had she chosen, leaned forward a spare few inches and pressed their lips together. She didn’t. “I missed you,” Pava heard herself say it before she realized it would happen.

Rey’s face lit up. “I missed you too! Is that odd? Because we only met a little, I mean, I thought maybe that was weird.” Her face was so open, so bright and unlined, and Pava regretted not kissing her a moment ago but also wanted to just look at her face for the next several centuries.

“Maybe it is.” _Daring, Pava_. “But it’s true.” Pava’s hand twitched, wanted to make a gesture of offering, but she stopped it.

“Is there, do you need to unload anything?” Rey looked over Pava’s shoulder at the _Mercator_ , which looked even less impressive on this incredible planet, sitting a stone’s throw from the goddess-blessed _Millennium Falcon_. But Rey looked at it like it was something special, and Pava melted again, more so.

“I, yeah, one sec, do you want to come onboard? I just need to grab a shoulder bag, it’s got some stuff for, um,” Pava gestured vaguely, something about a person of great honor, but Rey read it as just an inability to get the right words.

“No, I’ll wait here, I’ll tell Chewie and R2 what’s going on so they know.” Rey waved her toward the _Mercator_ ’s boxy shape.

The bag was waiting right beside the entry port. Pava stopped for a moment, stared at it. “Isn’t that interesting,” she said aloud as if not noticing R3’s very quiet whirring one wall away. “I was pretty sure I’d left that bag on my bunk. Lucky me, apparently it was here the whole time.” Pava grinned to herself. “R3, if you can hear me, thanks. And signal if you need anything, but you never seem to need anything, so. Um.” As if from far away, Pava heard a sneering whistle with just an edge of affection to it, and she laughed a little as she clambered back down the ramp.

“That was fast,” Rey said, snapping shut a communication device. “Come on, let’s find Master Luke, he’ll want to say hi.” Rey smiled, a slow and warm look spreading across her face, and Pava couldn’t keep an answering grin away. When Rey smiled, she looked like the heroine adventuress of a holovid, and Pava really needed to figure out how to not look at her like she was thinking exactly that all the time.

“Doesn’t he know we’re coming?” The steep rocks turned out to have a staircase of sorts carved into them, which Pava sent thanks skyward for because her knees still felt a little weak and she didn’t want to meet the Last Jedi huffing and red-faced and halfway dead if she could avoid it. Plus, walking behind Rey meant Rey couldn’t see her face, so she felt a little less like a raw nerve and a little more like an actual adult with emotional stability. Also, if Pava was to be perfectly honest, walking behind Rey meant seeing Rey walk, and Pava could do that all day.

“Probably, but he’ll stay there unless we go get him. He’s doing some Force things. He forgets to stop, sometimes.” Rey glanced behind her. “I was headed that way anyway, because it’s time for food. You said there’s an astromech droid on the ship?”

“Yeah, she’s horrible, you’ll love her.”

Rey laughed at that, and Pava felt the same pleased warmth she’d felt when she had made the General laugh. “I bet I will. Does she want to offboard? R2’s found a slope that gets you up here, she doesn’t have to do the stairs if she can’t or won’t.”

Pava huffed a little. The stairs were better than climbing a sheer cliff face, no doubt, but they were still hundreds of stairs in unfamiliar elevation. “No, she specifically told me that she wouldn’t offboard if I built her a new sabaac set with my useless human hands, so.”

Rey laughed again. “She sounds fantastic.”

“She is that.” Pava held one hand up in surrender. “Sorry, can we take a second? Just, you know, breathing.”

“We can do that.” Rey leaned against the cliff wall, one leg pulled up at an angle like a water bird. “How’s the General? How is the base? How is—um. Everything?” She didn’t appear to be out of breath at all.

Pava could hear the unasked question, the name left unsaid. “General’s good. Terrifying. The usual. Base is good.” Another breath. “Finn is good, really good.” Pava made brief eye contact with Rey, then took a few more breaths. “He’s walking around now, got a support droid for a while but when I left he was just using a regular staff. Also, him and Poe are, uh, you know. Together.”

Rey’s eyes lit up. “Good! That’s great. I bet they’re adorable together.”

“You’d be surprised.” Pava bounced on her heels a couple of times. “Thanks for stopping. I think I’m good now.”

“Master Luke,” Rey shouted up at a stone structure. “Master Luke, she’s here!”

No answer echoed back. The building looked like it may have once been a temple: crumbled columns lay grinding themselves into dust, steps cracked and shattered, what must have been a graceful arch half-collapsed now, letting weak sunlight spill in, no doubt. Rey cocked her head, like she was listening to something, then huffed. “Stubborn.” Turned to Pava. “He’s busy, told me to take you to the house. He’ll finish up, meet us there.”

“Will he?”

“Probably not,” Rey said, leading the way down another path. “He just gets wrapped up in things. Before I got here, I think he probably didn’t eat or sleep very much. The Force can sort of try to encourage to get him to take a break or rest, you know, but he’s very,” she paused. “Focused.”

“This is the house?” Pava asked as they stopped walking. It looked more like a barracks, like in the Academy.

“Well, it used to be, I think it was a sort of dormitory for visiting Jedi. But Master Luke lives in one set of rooms, and I have one. You’re more than welcome to bring the droid, too, R2 has his own spot.”

“Yeah, I’ll send her a message, but I’d be shocked if she leaves the ship.”

Rey nodded, brushed one hand along the side of her head. She looked different here, calmer. At the base she’d been scrambling, terrified for Finn, scraping together enough to get her here. Pava could feel some sort of peace emanating from her now, something settled and quiet where before Rey had reminded her of nothing so much as a desert scavenger, restless and hungry and never feeling safe. Here, in this place surrounded only by cool salt air and ocean breezes, Rey seemed more solid, more real.

“I’ll let you get settled, or clean up, or whatever it is you need to do,” Rey said, seeming not to notice that Pava had been staring. “I’m going to go chew out Master Luke some more, he knows he shouldn’t do this.” Rey met Pava’s eyes. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, will you wait for me?”

 _Don’t take the bait, Pava,_ her mind ordered. “Of course.”

The room, once Rey left, was small. Not as small as the bunk on the _Mercator_ , obviously, nor as small as her room at the base would be if she shared it (she was supposed to be sharing it with Prindel but Prindel more often than not was with one of her mates at night). But still small. A tiny square window looked out onto the endless sea, and Pava wondered if this had actually been some kind of a prison. It certainly didn’t feel welcoming or homey, not like she would have expected for visiting Jedi. But then, they were supposedly sort of hermits, not supposed to be luxurious or wealthy. There were more than enough didactic holos in which a wandering, dirty, starving creature turned out to be a Jedi Master in disguise, where the people who treated them badly were punished and those who were kind were rewarded. But, too, there were holos in which Jedi were wealthy, obscene creatures with rings on every digit and a harem drenched in gold. The truth, Pava’s father had always said, can be found between any two extremes. Probably the Jedi were like that. Alternately, maybe it had been much nicer when there was a crowd of visiting voices here, chattering and clamoring for attention. The emptiness of the room echoed every move Pava made, and it was deeply unnerving. Loud barracks were the norm for her life, and even onboard a ship there would the be ever-present hum of engines, the thump of things not quite working, R3’s complaints, beeps and whistles and noises innumerable, all around all the time, flowing into an undercurrent Pava hadn’t realized until just now she missed.

“Pava!” She heard a shout from outside the window. Looked out, looked down. Rey stood far below on the sliver of cliff behind the barracks. Beside her stood an old man. _No, not old, look again, Pava_. A man with grey and white weaving through a scraggly beard, unkempt hair. Wrinkles and sunspots on his face. Stance like a grandfather back from a war. A robe. A metal hand. _Oh, goddess, give me strength_. “Pava, this is Master Luke, come down here! We’re hungry!”

Pava tore her eyes away from the figure that had defined so much of her entire childhood. Rubbed her hands over her face a few times, like a prey animal. Stepped out into the stone hallway. Each step took an eternity, and yet she arrived on the cliffs beside Rey and the Last Jedi far too soon.

“Master Luke,” Rey said, smile wide, “this is Pava, Jessika Pava, I mean. She’s a pilot with the Resistance.”

His eyes were terrible and beautiful, sad and clever and darker than she’d expected. He nodded once. “Yes, I can see that.” As he turned to look at Rey, Pava saw his expression shift, and she ached suddenly to have that kindness aimed at her, too. He could be so kind, she could tell, if he chose to. “Shall we?”

* * *

 

The meal was simple, but had a couple of weird dishes she’d never seen. “What is this?” she asked, pointing at a leafy stew with chunks of something that might have been a fish.

An answering roar echoed in the room. The Wookiee had been seated already when they came in, had waved one huge limb in greeting. Rey, it turned out, understood enough Shyriiwook to get around, and the Wookiee clearly understood Basic perfectly well. Rey translated, “Chewie made it. It’s good, you’ll like it!” She pushed the dish toward Pava with a big smile. Pava blushed. The Wookiee saw it, made a sound that even Pava knew was a laugh.

“I wish the astromech didn’t hate offboarding so much,” Rey said as if she hadn’t noticed. “R2 went out to visit her, that’s where he is, but I’d like to meet her, too.”

“You can,” Pava said through a mouthful of the Wookiee’s dish, which was legitimately delicious. Turned out to be some kind of a root, not a fish. “You can all come meet her if you want, but fair warning, she really doesn’t care for humans.”

“Droids pick up personalities,” a quiet voice broke in from the other side of the table. “Probably whoever built her didn’t care for them either.”

It was the first time Master Luke had spoken since “Shall we?” and Pava felt the words on her skin. If the compulsions she had were the Force working in her, that echoing strangeness, that power, was thrilled to be near him. Part of it was Pava’s own response to meeting a legend, she knew that, she wasn’t stupid, but being here in a place so drenched in the Force that the Jedi had chosen to worship here (or study it, or whatever, a temple didn’t necessitate worship) was throwing her systems into disarray. When the Last Jedi spoke, it flared up even worse.

“Or she could have had a bad experience with humans, they learn, too,” Rey said, garbled by her mouthful of bread.

“Hmmm,” the Jedi responded, and lapsed back into silence. They ate quietly for a few more moments, then he shook his head as if he’d lost an argument. “Rey, I’m going to go get some work done. You and your friend have fun. Remember you have meditation this evening, on the soap cliff.” He looked over at Pava, a fleeting glance, barely anything at all. “Miss Pava.”

“Please,” she heard herself say, “please call me Pava. Everyone does.”

Now his gaze rested on her face, and she felt it almost physically, as if he was pressing his hands to her features, feeling them like a blind man. “Pava.” He nodded at her once, clapped the Wookiee on the shoulder, walked away. In his wake, Pava could have sworn she saw eddies of something whirl and dance. Probably it was just dust kicked up in the sunlight. Probably.


	3. this is a breathing exercise

She didn’t expect to sleep well. Pava’d been a good sleeper once, before flying had turned into war, before the compulsion had roared in her skin so strongly, before — just, before. In the Academy. As a kid. Not these days. But whether it was the air being different, or the height of the place, or that she could almost feel Rey on her skin, or something just this side of magic, she slept like a rock. Dropped into her narrow cot, barely toed off her boots, deep into nothingness. If she dreamed, she didn’t remember.

But sleeping deeply didn’t stop old habits. She woke fully, immediately, like always, like an alarm had sounded, like her flight suit was halfway on. When the sun stole into her room, she was already dressed, sitting on the floor, trying to be unobtrusive. The little square window, just too small and just too high to really offer a good view ( _you can see the sea, Pava, what more do you demand?_ ), caught the light and slanted it across to where a head would be were its occupant still in bed. “That’s clever,” she said to no one. “Like a morning bell.”

She rose, stood, stretched her arms above her head. Her thoughts began to admonish, _you should go see R3_ , but she was already out the door. Walking down the endless stairs took her breath away again, in the same exact spot walking up with Rey had, and she leaned against the sheer stone face. Breathed, breathed. An unbidden memory ( _tiny Pava, shaking from a nightmare, one or three of the sisters crowding around her, keeping the dark away_ ) flared up in her head, so strong and sudden that she staggered. Shook it off. Kept walking.

The _Mercator_ looked, strangely, more likable in the early morning light. Looked clunky and ugly and old, still, but familiar. Solid. Real. She patted a nacelle affectionately as the ramp lowered. R3 was waiting, rocking back and forth ever so slightly.  <Hello, organic idiot>, in the tone of someone welcoming a family member.

“Hello, Maker-made asshole,” Pava replied, a smile stretching across her face. “How’s the coupler?”

They chatted amiably, half in binary, while R3 wheeled toward the part of the floor they’d left open for their constant watchdog checks. Everything looks fine. R3 pulled up a shaky holo of the blueprints, pointed out a small repair that would be easier, she bleeps, <with your fiddly meat hands>. Pava grinned. R3 whistled just a little, her version of a mischievous smile. The repair took an hour, give or take, and by the end of it Pava felt almost fully herself again. R3’s running recap of her meeting with the legendary R2-D2 kept Pava laughing, the work steadied her hands, and the pressure of whatever this place was, the reasons she was here, the itch under her heart, they all eased back.

Pava had always loved that about ships, how there was always something that needed doing, something halfway broken, something she could make better or keep running. She’d fallen for mechanics after she’d flown the first time, that aborted little jump in her friend Zara’s speeder. After they got caught ( _technically you stole it_ , her thoughts argued; her stomach dipped, sense memory of that first takeoff, so strong she thought she might throw up), she’d been grounded, sent to the mechanics’ shed to work off the debt from crashing it. Flying, even for a few moments, had opened up some new part of her: seeing the sprawling guts of her grandfather’s old smuggler craft, Maia pointing out which part connected where, getting the thing working again - that opened her the rest of the way. She’d staggered out of the shed feeling half-drunk, exhausted, her hands aching in a way she never wanted to end. This, here, too, was like that. 

Flying had done much the same, given her blood a fizz of joy, lightened her dour moods. She’d wept the first time she landed an X-wing on her own, wept just for a moment in the cockpit by herself. The training droid assigned to her had been tactful, had busied himself with doing maintenance routines. Let her have that moment. Here, now, she could feel tears rising again, threatening under her eyes; all her nerve endings and emotions felt so raw. “I need to fly something soon, maybe.” Her voice echoed against the pipes and filters and wires around her. R3 didn’t reply, busy welding something. Defecting to the Resistance had taken away so much of Pava’s joy, so many of the things that gave her herself, but flying and fixing machines, those she’d been allowed to keep. Anchors, kite strings, wings, roots: in that small space below the floor of a ship she mostly hated, with a droid who hated her ( _not really hate, Pava, you know that_ ), on a planet she couldn’t understand doing a job she barely grasped for a woman she loved and feared - well. She needed all the steadying she could get.

Later, after a rest and a test and a solid thumping from R3 at some old-timey strategy holo the droid had gotten from R2, she needed to leave. Needed to breathe air and look at water, talk to no one. R3 had scrounged up some altitude adjustment meds from the sickbay, and Pava downed them dry, grateful. As she stepped out of the _Mercator_ , she raised a hand to R3. “See you later, bolt bucket.”

<Don’t get yourself killed, water bag>

Pava’s laugh echoed against the closing ramp door. 

* * *

“You’re up early,” a quiet voice spoke from behind her.

She scrambled to her feet, swiped half-heartedly at the clay caking her pants. “Sorry, sir, I—“

He held up one hand. “Don’t worry about it.” Looked out over the water. “It’s a good place to think.”

“Yes, sir.” She didn’t let herself wonder why, after barely two words yesterday, he initiated a conversation. Her inner child was screeching in excitement and panic far too loudly. Every inch of her skin felt alive, felt chilled.

He groaned and sunk onto the ground. “Please, please, don’t call me ’sir.’ My sister is ’sir.’ I can just about handle ‘Master Luke’ and I definitely don’t want you to stand up while I sit down.” He looked up and met her eyes with the ghost of a smile. “Come on.”

Pava dropped back into the cross-legged pose she had been in before. She hadn’t expected this, hadn’t expected to feel a familiarity, an ease around him. That first impression, that cold calculation in his ancient eyes, had thrown her. She had grown up idolizing the Last Jedi, the warrior prince of the holos, but had believed that, had she ever met him in the flesh, she’d turn into a stammering staring mess. Then, when she had met him, he had seemed less interested in her than in a speck of dust on his robe. Instead, now, with his attention aimed even the slightest bit in her direction, she felt like his own comfort settled her, put her in a calmer state than normal. “You’re the Last Jedi, sir — Master Luke, I mean. People are just trying to show you respect.”

“I don’t need their respect, or want it for that matter,” he grumbled.

She felt a lightness bubble up in her heart, and for one of the first times since deserting the New Republic, she spoke with no thought at all as to the consequences. “You’re younger than you look, huh? Whining like my baby sister just before she throws a tantrum.”

He laughed then, a real one, the first time she’d heard him laugh. Even in the holos and the stories, the Last Jedi was a solemn figure. When he laughed, it was like years dripped off of him. For a moment, she could see that he was the same age as the General, despite the beard and his weathered face. For a moment, she could see that he was still young, full of life, and could see, too, how he must have looked when the war was going on, how he must have looked when the Force first came to him. “How old’s your baby sister?”

“Oh, shit — sorry, Master Luke.”

“Shit, don’t be sorry.” He smiled, and she smiled back.

“I meant to say that I’ll need to do some math to answer that. I’m twenty-three, so—“

“Really?” He looked something like surprised.

“Yes, Master Luke.” She remembered, blushed: he would have been twenty-three at the Battle of Endor, the last giant battle of the Rebellion.

“Twenty-three can be a momentous age.” He looked away from her, out over the water.

“Yes, Master Luke.” Earned the ghost of a smile from him, went on. “My oldest sister is thirty-one, so if I do my math right, my baby sister turned seventeen last month.”

“How many sisters do you have?” _They really are twins,_ Pava thought to herself.

“Six, Master Luke. I’m the fourth. There’s a set of twins in there, just before the baby.”

“Your poor parents,” he said mock-ruefully.

“Yes, Master Luke.”

“I thought having just one sister was bad, and I didn’t even grow up with her.”

Pava made a gesture of amusement, more out of habit than of expectation that the Last Jedi knew Prindel’s people’s movements. When he responded with a gesture that encompassed both laughter and a sort of shrugging _don’t worry about it_ concept, she startled.

“Sorry, sorry,” Master Luke said with an odd expression, a sort of not-a-smile smile. “Forgot I wasn’t talking to myself.”

Pava pasted on a smile. Surprises shouldn’t scare her this badly, she was normally much more composed, but everything felt too big and strange and new and it made her jumpy. Tense. Sensitive. Lonely. Whatever combination of feelings that swirled in her head was disorienting. She tried to bat it away with a facile question, like a child. “Does the Force help you do that, pick up languages?”

He made another gesture, less familiar to Pava. It implied something like _maybe, sort of_ , but didn’t look like the movement Prindel would have used for that. “The meaning behind the words, a little. The Force is good at reading intent. Specific languages, not really, more general communication. But also I spent a lot of time traveling, picked up some things.”

“Me too.” Pava’s gesture was supposed to be one of contentment, but it slipped away from her, became something more like sorrow.

“Pava, right?” At her nod, he continued. “The name sounds familiar. Where are you from, Felucia? No, not with the way you speak.”

“Dandoran, Master Luke.”

“Ah, that sounds about right.” He flexed his metal hand, watched the fingers click-click-click with no apparent interest. “Been home recently?”

“No, Master Luke, not since I joined the Resistance. We deserted our posts, they say.” Pava could still feel the sick solid pit in her stomach that had grown there when her old captain had called her a traitor, shouted it at her back as she’d walked away from most of the people she loved. Some days she felt nothing but guilt about leaving; some days she was so happy to be gone she could barely breathe. Today, here, she felt both. “Desertion’s a death penalty, so until we win, we can’t go back.” Stomach aching, she thought of home. The first time she’d seen the planet from atmo rose up in her mind, as vivid as anything. She saw her hometown, rolling hills over swampy plains, squat square houses nestled in the reeds. Her own house, a roof painted bright red (superstitious grandmothers thought it brought good luck). She heard her father laughing, smelled a steaming pot of rice, felt the pressure of her sisters crowding around her, and all her senses flooded with _home, home, home_. It had been happening since she’d landed, but she was drowning in it now, lost to something she didn’t understand. “What are you doing to me?” the cry sounded in her voice but also, she felt, echoed in her mind.

“I’m not doing anything,” an answering echo sounded. The sensations started to fade, one by one. “Well, now I’m doing something, but I didn’t start making you homesick. That wasn’t me. I’m helping to get it off you so you can breathe, but I didn’t put it there.”

“What are you talking about?” Her heart still raced, she could hear herself panting, her skin crawled. Her father’s face bled away into nothingness, and Pava felt her hands spasm in a parody of grasping. “What was that?” She pounded the ground with one fist, three quick raps - Dameron did it when he was frustrated, they’d all picked it up. “It’s been happening since I landed. What is going on?”

“This place, where we are. Do you know what this place is?” He didn’t wait for her to answer, spoke smooth and soft like a soothing mother. “It’s the First Jedi Temple. The Force built this place almost on its own, with only a little help from the Jedi knights. It’s very powerful here.” A gesture of reconciliation, of calm. “What’s already inside you just, I don’t know what the word would be. Sparked? Woke up? Something like that.”

All that was left of the disorienting images was a flicker of moss green overlaying the stones around them, but Pava couldn’t stop breathing hard and fast, couldn’t stop herself from shaking. “You mean you didn’t fuck with my head?”

The Last Jedi didn’t flinch at the profanity, or at the anger coursing through her, or at the steady rise in volume to a near-scream on the last word. Even the shuddering flock of seabirds her cry startled into flight didn’t faze him.

She didn’t know what she was asking, what she needed, what she thought he could do, but it burst from her voice all on its own, “Master Luke?”

“Take a breath, Pava.”

In the holos, when a Jedi Knight used the Force on a person, his voice deepened, got richer, changed in some noticeable way. Master Luke’s didn’t do that. It sounded the same as the pleasant tone with which he’d asked her to sit with him. His voice didn’t change, nor did his body language. He was still just the gray-bearded man she’d seen at landing, the Last Jedi, who apparently swore and laughed and sounded just like his sister sometimes. Who was cold and frightening and also warm and likable, who contained multitudes and was so powerful she could nearly smell it. He looked at her expectantly, and she remembered what he’d said.

She took a shaking breath.

“Another, Pava. Slow and even. Not deep like you’re drowning, shallow, like you’re hiding from someone.” Master Luke closed his eyes, and she could almost feel him brushing away tendrils of panic from her mind, the lightest of touches, barely even there. “That heartbeat should be slower. Find the center. Keep breathing.”

She felt more than heard the rest of the litany Master Luke recited. Found her center, the still, small stone in her heart, and focused on it. Used it to settle her pulse, to clear the ringing from her ears. Kept breathing, the breaths getting deeper and farther apart as her heartbeat slowed.

When Pava opened her eyes to see Master Luke, his eyes still closed, the barest hint of a smile behind his beard, she felt like she’d woken up from a deep sleep. For the first time since joining the Resistance, she could detect no traces of panic or shame in her heart or mind. For the first time since landing on this place, she felt like she was really and truly here, not trapped with one foot in some other time or place. She nearly wept.

“Better, Pava. Good job.” He opened his eyes, flexed the fingers on his hand - the real hand, not the metal one.

The praise fell on her face like the sun, warmed her through and through. “Thank you, Master Luke.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes. The ease Pava had felt around him was there still, but shifted slightly. She sensed, in some dim corner of her mind, that Master Luke was agitated.

“You’re very Force-sensitive, aren’t you?” He didn’t look at her when he asked, looked instead out onto the water. She felt more than saw his body language change.

“Master Luke?”

“Is that why my sister sent you to get Rey, to get me?” He turned to face her, his expression placid enough on the surface, but a jolt of anger twined out to the dim corner of her mind where Pava could feel what Master Luke was feeling, and she saw the fire behind his eyes.

“She sent me, Master Luke, for a few reasons. I don’t think Force sensitivity was one of the important ones.” _Diplomacy, that’s a new trick for you, Pava._

A curse in what Pava thought might be Huttese slipped from the Last Jedi. “My sister is an excellent strategist, and she was married to a son of a bitch, and she works with a slippery crew. I can’t imagine she had another reason more compelling.”

“Master Luke, she sent me because I’m a damn fine pilot, and because Rey and I have a connection, or could, or at least, I mean,” she faltered. “And maybe the Force has a little to do with it, too, but I assure you that I am more than qualified to—“

“She has hundreds of pilots, better than you and faster and with less panic in their hearts.” He did not say it cruelly, which made it all the worse.

Pava flinched. Heat flared up in her face. “Sir, she sent me because she thought I could do the job.” _Maybe, Pava, maybe not._ “She didn’t send Dameron because he’s too aggressive. She didn’t send a stranger because you might have disappeared again. She sent me because Rey knows me, because I’m a, I’m not the best pilot but I’m good, and, sure, maybe a little because of the Force. But I—“

“Poe Dameron is a better spy and a better pilot. Of course, he also would have tried to knock me out to get me back there, and that would have ended, let’s say, unpleasantly for everyone.” The smile that knifed across his face was cold. “Instead, my brilliant sister sent you, all pain and fear wrapped up in a mind so soaked in the Force it can barely think straight, so I’d feel obligated to help, compelled to, and you’d bring me back easy as breathing, was that the plan?”

“Sir, I—“

“I know my sister well enough at this point to know that she never has just one reason to do anything. It’s always eight or ten reasons of varying importance, but never just a simple one. Never just that you’re a good enough pilot and you like Rey.”

“Master Luke, I didn’t—“

He stood, not angry in his body language anymore but calm, cool, almost at a remove. “I apologize, Pava. My frustration is not with you, it’s with my sister.” He didn’t reach out a hand to help her up, but he didn’t walk away and leave her, either. He looked towards the sky, shaded one hand over his eyes. “Sun’s getting higher, Rey’ll be awake soon.” He smiled a little, fond. “Desert kids love to sleep late, it’s a failing of ours.” Looked at Pava, his face almost normal again. “Shall we?”

“Master Luke, I assure you, I came here for you and Rey, no ulterior motives.” She stood, brushed the worst of the clay off.

“It’s not your motives that I suspect.” A deep breath, and Pava could almost hear the tension ease, just a little. “I know, Pava. It’s unlikely you could fake the need for training so well.” They began to walk as he spoke.

“Training, Master Luke?” She made a gesture for a children’s story, something that made little sense, her teeth and tongue flooded with shame, with copper and bile. “All due respect, I’m not that Force-sensitive. They test us at the Academy. Right in the middle, average ability on all marks.” _Why are you lying to him, Pava?_

Master Luke huffed, something like a laugh, and they walked in silence the rest of the way.

* * *

A few days passed. Pava went back to the Mercator to sleep most nights: the enclosed space of her bunk seemed, somehow, to block out the oceans of sensation and memory that kept bubbling up. When they came, she breathed, shifted in her seat or on her feet, dove down into herself to find the small stone at her center. Rode out the wave. Shook her head like a baby rancor, took the next step. She coaxed R3 offboard once, got her up to meet the Last Jedi. R3 called him something Pava didn’t quite catch, and the Last Jedi smirked. He met Pava’s gaze, dropped his eyes away. She could feel his uncertainty, could very nearly hear it swirling around him. He left the room, left Rey staring after him, left R3 confused. “Come on,” Pava said to the droid, the taste of metal in her mouth. “Let’s get you back to the ship.” As they left, Pava noted which way Rey stalked.

When the sun was almost below the horizon, she gathered herself to herself, went where she had last seen Rey. She followed the signs ( _remember Saph teaching you to track flobworms?_ ) across the craggy steps, to an outcropping she hadn’t been before. Here, white paving stones long-used sprouted from the mossy ground. They led her to a sort of amphitheater, a set-in-the-ground ring of seats, concentric and spiraling down to an open space. It was dark, now, and small lights came on automatically along the seats. It must have been a place for speeches, for performance or argument, and then Pava saw the Last Jedi, standing alone, moving his hands. She listened, hard, but could not catch the words.

Master Luke spoke to an empty stage. No, not empty, not quite. Pava didn’t see anyone else but she—it almost seemed like she smelled them, or felt their heat. She sensed people, other people there. No definite shapes or sizes, she didn’t hear them, but when Master Luke’s voice paused she knew in the pit of her stomach that the people, the people who were there and also not there, they were answering him. Arguing, it seemed, for though she couldn’t make out his words she knew Master Luke’s tone to be one of anger and disagreement.

“He’s arguing with—” a whisper in the dark came.

Pava did not scream, but only because Rey’s hand slapped over her mouth in a flash, sealing the noise away from the space around them.

“Shh, shh, sorry, it’s all right.” Rey whispered, her breath tickling the back of Pava’s neck. “Sorry, Jessika, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

 _Distracted, Pava?_ Rey’s hand felt rough and scarred, and Pava wanted nothing more than to take it in her own hands, pore over each mark, trace them with her fingertips. Well, she wanted to do more, too, but the overwhelming desire to hold Rey’s hand surprised her.

“He’s arguing with the ghosts, is what I was going to say.” She withdrew her hand, and Pava very nearly leaned after it, tried to keep it. “They’re not here all the time, and at first I couldn’t tell when they were here, but I can, don’t know, feel them now? Smell them? Something.”

“Ghosts?” Pava whispered. “Like in the stories?”

She felt Rey shrug one shoulder. “I think they’re Jedi ghosts. Can there be a Jedi ghost?”

“I think a Jedi could probably make a ghost if they wanted.” Pava leaned ever so slightly into Rey’s warm arm. “What are they arguing about?”

Rey huffed. “Me. Same as always. I think they tell him I’m too old to train, plus I’m a girl.”

“A girl — that doesn’t matter.” Pava had always hoped that a childhood wasted reading too much about the lost Jedi Order would come in handy someday. “There have always been female Jedi. Hasn’t he, Master Luke, hasn’t he told you?” Rey’s silence didn’t seem promising, so Pava soldiered on. “You should read about Adi Gallia, she was on the Jedi Council before the Clone Wars, and a hell of a pilot, too. You’ll love her.”

“I don’t think Master Luke cares much about me being a girl. He never mentions it.” Rey fiddled with the edge of her trousers. “I don’t even think the ghosts really care. I think it’s my age, and that I’m, you know.” Rey fell silent.

“You’re what?”

Another one-shouldered shrug. “I’m nobody. A scavenger orphan from a desert planet.”

Pava laughed almost too loudly. “Do you know who Luke Skywalker was before he was Master Luke?” She made a gesture of reassurance and affection almost too easily, although she knew Rey probably didn’t understand. “An orphaned kid on a desert planet. His father, before he went to the Dark Side? A slave on a desert planet. If anything, you’re too much like them.”

Rey nodded, Pava felt more than saw. “That’s the problem, I think. I’m too old, like they were, the both of them. And you’re not supposed to train someone too old. Or the ghosts don’t think so anyway.”

“Master Luke clearly does.” _Goddess, give me strength_. “And he’s the one who matters, right? He’s your Master. These ghosts are nobody, not you.”

Rey didn’t react for a long while, just listened to Master Luke’s voice echo against the stones, listened to his silences so full of something. They sat, shoulder to shoulder, and watched the man below them argue with nothing, or with himself, or with the Force, until they fell asleep.

 

The next day, Master Luke came to the _Mercator_. “Well, this is a heap.”

It startled a laugh out of Pava, and a bristle of possessive pride out of R3. “Can I help you, Master Luke?”

“Come for a walk with me, Pava.” He held out one flesh hand to her, and for just a moment Pava thought about saying no, about getting in the ship and flying back to base, about shutting this moment of possibility away and going back to what she knew.

They walked along what Master Luke called the soap cliff. “Why’d you call it that?”

He smirked, looked exactly like his sister for a moment. “I didn’t call it anything, it was called that on the maps. Stupid name,” he said with fondness, “but so’s Skywalker, so.”

“Sir, the Force,” the question spilled out before she could stop it, “does it ever make you do something? That you don’t want to do?” His eyes were careful, blank but not confused, and she continued, nearly stuttering with the anxiety to just say it, just tell someone, just once, tell someone the truth. Dameron and her squadron knew bits and pieces, things she couldn’t hide, and her family had known a little, things she hadn’t yet learned to hide, and maybe it was the way this planet seemed soaked in memory and impossible to find but she emptied all the hidden words out onto the grass. They had stopped walking, and she talked until she couldn’t breathe, and Master Luke looked out at the sky and the sea. Listened. Made no movement. She stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, like a faucet turned off. Had no more words to say.

A pause. “How old were you when this started happening?” Master Luke’s eyes, clear and calm, met her own.

 _Careful, Pava_. “I think, I mean, I don’t really remember.” _Liar_. “They’ve always happened, I think. Maybe. I’m not sure.” _Liar, liar, liar_.

“Hmm.” He looked away, over the ocean. Looked back at her. “If you don’t want to talk about them, we don’t have to. It would help you, probably. Sometimes I don’t know what I think about something until I argue about it with someone else.” He sounded so much like a teacher, like an uncle, and Pava had to swallow down the urge to open her arms for a hug.

“Like the ghosts?” _Shut up, Pava!_

He frowned for a moment. “Oh, Rey told you. Yes, the Force ghosts, although they don’t like to be called that.” The frown disappeared into his normal expression. “They’re good to argue with, since they can’t quite do anything about whatever you’re fighting about. And they all disagree with me and with each other, all in different ways, so that’s helpful.”

“Who are they? Were they here when you got here?”

“Some of them. Three came with me - two of my old masters, and my father. Or a version of my father, anyway. He left a long time ago, though.”

“Are they real?”

A gesture for uncertainty. “I think so. You can probably sense them, like Rey can.” At her nod, he continued. “They could just be the Force itself but they act the way I would expect them to if they were real. The ones that were here already, they’re more like the Force talking than people, like they’ve forgotten themselves a little.” He closed his eyes. “Can you feel them? They’re part of the Force, all around us. Through us.”

Pava closed her eyes as well, tried to will her mind to reach out. “No, Master Luke.”

“That’s all right. It comes and goes for everyone. That’s what training is about, Pava.”

She opened her eyes to see him almost smiling. “Learning to feel it all the time?”

“You could say that, but really, it’s learning to find it when it’s not there. That’s a bigger part of it.” He studied her face for a moment, a thoughtful frown creasing his face.

“I think I started feeling this way when I was small, Master Luke.” She could feel him nodding to himself. “The Force made me find my mother, itched at me until I did it, and she was sick, nearly dying, and the Force saved her life.”

“Through you.”

“And then the next time it happened, I did what it told me, and it stopped a fire.”

“You stopped the fire.” He didn’t say it like an argument, but like he was agreeing with her. That was wrong, subtly off, but she couldn’t place how or why.

“The Force did, yes. And then any time I would try to ignore it, to not do what it said, something bad happened.”

“Pava, I,” he stopped. Looked down at the grass, met her eyes briefly, looked over the sea. “So you stopped fighting it.”

“Yes, Master Luke, but I—“ _how to explain this, goddess, help me_ , “I don’t like it. It’s frightening and it makes things difficult and it hurts.”

Master Luke’s frown deepened. “The Force shouldn’t hurt you, Pava. It shouldn’t make you do anything, either. Suggest, sure, but not compel like this, like what you’ve described.” A gesture of concern. “Would you mind if I took a look in your mind? I wouldn’t look at anything but the Force, the way it’s flowing in you.”

Pava didn’t want him in her head, would scream if he looked too closely at her. Her throat closed, she could not tell him.

He thought for a moment, head cocked almost as if he could hear her panic. “Frankly, I don’t even need to see in your head, now that I think about it. Just sort of the air around you.” Met her eyes. “All you would need to do is breathe calmly. You could meditate if you like, or go to sleep, or watch me like a seabird.” She half smiled, and he went on. “I’ll be doing nothing, really, just looking at you and thinking, but I might ask you a question once in a while. Or move my hands.”

A long pause. “I can handle that.”

He gave her a real smile. With it, he looked ten years younger and she wondered, suddenly, what he had been like then, before a decade of Force ghosts and mourning. “I figure you could handle anything, Pava.”

They sat facing each other, the damp moss of the soap cliff soaking through their clothes. They talked, some out loud and some with gestures. They quieted, looked at everything but each other, then held each others’ gaze until Master Luke nodded. “That should help some, Pava. I don’t,” he struggled for a word, made a gesture for frustration aimed not at her but at the external situation. “I don’t know what’s going on, with you, with the Force. But I’d like to find out. Would it,” he paused, “would it be all right if I talked it over with the Force? Maybe with Rey a bit, too? She’s got a good head for this kind of stuff.”

Pava nodded. The exercises and the talking and whatever very soft touches of the Force he had used were helping, did help. The constant background hum in her head was quieter, although not all gone, and her skin felt like it very nearly fit, and she could think clearly again. “Just, I,” a gesture for embarrassment, “thank you, Master Luke.”

He waved the thanks away. “Remember the exercises we talked about, if it happens again. You should meditate every day, at least. Keep you on an even keel while we work this out.”

“Master Luke, I have to ask—“

“No,” he interrupted. “You don’t, but I understand why you feel you do. I’m not going to the base with you. Not right now, maybe not ever, but definitely not this trip.” He smiled a little, sadly, like he wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. “My sister will hate me for about a second and then get right back to work. I’ll write up a message.” He stood, knees creaked and bones unsteady for just a moment, _he’s getting older, Pava_ , cracked his neck one way and then the other. “You should ask Rey, though. She’d do well there, and we’re about to hit the end of what I can safely teach her here anyway.”

As he walked away, Pava stayed seated. She waited for the choking feeling of failure, waited for her thoughts to call her worthless, pathetic, should-be-dead-instead-of, but nothing came. The thrum of her heart stayed steady. She stood, too, after some time. Wandered back to where Rey was playing a catch-ball game of her own devising against Chewie. When Rey saw her, that smile could have powered the _Falcon_ all by itself.

“Want to come back to D’Qar with me?” _Smooth, Pava_.

Rey looked confused. “What?”

Pava cleared her throat. “Sorry, um. Master Luke’s not going to come fight for the Resistance. That was my job, here, why the General sent me. To find out. So.” She breathed, long shallow breath, found that stone just where it should be in the center of herself. “So I figured tomorrow or the day after I’d head back. Master Luke said, offered, that if you wanted to go with me, you could. That he might come later.” She glanced over to where Chewie was listening, thoughtful. “Or you could come back after a visit, if you want. Whatever you want.”

Rey bit her lip, looked away. “I don’t, maybe. I’m not sure.” She looked, too, at Chewie, and at R2. “They miss their friends, and I miss Finn. And you.” They smiled at each other for half a heartbeat. “Maybe. Let me think about it.”

“Of course.” Pava made a soothing gesture, and Rey almost seemed to catch it. “Hungry?”

“Always.”

They strode together toward the kitchens, step by step, not touching but very near. The damp green overgrowth held, for just a moment, the imprints of their steps.


	4. we are harder than doubt had bargained

Pava had very nearly fallen asleep - eyes flickering, muscles relaxing, tinges of dark around her vision - when R3 slammed a tool down on the floor, hard. <Message for you, meatbag>

“You’re the best, R3,” Pava said, one hand raised into a gesture even the least sign-reading being would recognize. The droid whirred and rolled off, doing her version of a snicker. Pava felt around blindly in her locker and pulled up the message screen:

STATUS UPDATE REQUESTED STOP HOW’S THE IDIOT STOP SIGNATURE CODE BOUSHH

Pava snorted, sent back:

STATUS NOMINAL STOP IDIOT REMAINING BUT OTHER ONE MAYBE RETURNING STOP SIGNATURE CODE WING

It would take the message a few hours to reach the base, and with turnaround time, Pava had a little bit before she’d need to explain anything. She trekked back up the endless stone stairs, ate with Rey and Chewie, finally got around to that nap. R3’s whistle over the _Mercator_ ’s hailing speaker woke her up much more nicely than the clang of metal on metal. Probably the difference was that R3 hadn’t just lost a round of holo chess this time. The little droid was a sore loser and not a great winner, either.

SOUNDS RIGHT STOP DO YOUR BEST STOP JOB ON THE WAY BACK DETAILS TO COME STOP SIGNATURE CODE BOUSHH

Pava wondered, as she always did, why the General used such a weird signature code on messages. Most of the squadron used flight terms - Ziff was Cockpit, which he had thought was really funny when he’d drunkenly picked it and then immediately regretted. Snap tended to use Sparkplug on the rare messages he had to send. Oddy used Feedback, though, and Asty had used Mu, so it wasn’t a hard and fast rule. Pava knew a couple of pilots who used Winter and Spring, because they tended to work in pairs, and another who always used Homestead. It just needed to be memorable, short, easy to spell, and not stupidly obvious as to who the person behind it might be. 

The general tendency of the pilots to use code names that were normal words rather than actual names wasn’t something any of them thought about very willingly. They could have used Academy nicknames but…it was hard to explain. Same as when the General had brought up the Testor handle, it felt off. Wrong. Like the Academy stuff belonged to some younger versions of themselves, like the people they’d been then were shattered when they left their homes for the last time. Snap had always been Snap, but the rest of them had shed those old names like skins. If anyone had suggested Pava sign a message code name Testor she’d have had to leave the room. It was sore, was all, the memories of being young and happy and flying for the first time. They navigated to avoid it now, skittered around talking too deep about where they were from, even though they’d known each other nearing a decade at this point. Lots of things brought it on, the sorrow, the homesickness they all worried at like loose teeth. Wing had been a safe choice, somehow not already claimed, and besides it was the name of a heroic pilot in a children’s holo Pava’s little sisters had liked.

Boushh, though, didn’t mean anything to Pava. Probably made it a good code name, all things considered, but Pava wondered if it was really tied to some adventure back in the early days, some story the General hadn’t ever told. There seemed to be a lot of those stories floating around; Rey had told her a couple about Master Luke, about this or that planet, this or that young Jedi, this or that battle. Master Luke never said a thing, just listened, looked at his metal hand. Sometimes he’d walk away, and Rey would look apologetic, scurry after him. Pava felt vaguely guilty when that happened, but, if she was honest with herself, she could feel her inner heart turn into a tiny child screaming with delight at hearing Jedi stories no one else knew.

In return, some kind of offering, she told her stories, too. Not the worst ones, but the funny ones. The ones she would sometimes tweak to get a girl in bed, although she tried not to let Rey see it (she did think Master Luke could tell, as he’d sometimes glance at her with a particularly cheeky expression). Stories about undercover missions where she was a dancing girl or a stormtrooper, how badly she acted, how Poe had shortly decided she was no good for undercover and put her on muscle duty instead. “Snap’s the best actor of us all, which you might think, ridiculous, he’s a humanoid male with not a trace of exo about him,” Pava had explained in the dark as they’d watched Master Luke and the ghosts argue. “But that’s why, I think, because he looks like he couldn’t lie if he tried, so people just believe him. Me, I don’t look trustworthy, I guess.”

“What?” Rey looked genuinely offended. “Pava, you look trustworthy to me. And I grew up with desert scavengers. I have a decent feel for that.”

Pava laughed a little. “I didn’t mean, I just mean, I was kind of joking. Dandoran, where I’m from, it’s a smugglers’ planet for the most part. My parents were smugglers until they had us, and everyone we knew had a smuggler or ten in the family. It’s a compliment, there, to look untrustworthy. Not that funny, I guess.”

“Would you,” Rey looked very lightly embarrassed. “Tell me a little bit about your planet? I’ve only been to Jakku and like two other places my whole life. What’s it like?”

Pava blew a puff of air from her cheeks. “Wet. Swampy. We live, most of us, in little houses. For good luck, you paint the roof red. If someone’s had a baby they put these, um,” she tried to make a shape in the air with her hands. “They’re kind of shaped like water plants, I don’t know, but you put those out front so people know. My sisters lived at home, we all do, until they got married.”

“Are they all married?”

“Goddess, no, not yet. Aleia’s never going to marry, she’s already declared herself, but Ana and Maia and Saphria all are. Ana has three kids.” Pava coughed. Stalled. “Had, I mean, when I left. Saphria’s wife was pregnant then, and Maia, she can’t but they were fostering a passel like people do there.” Coughed again.

“I’m sorry, it’s weird to talk about them, right?” Rey pressed her shoulder to Pava’s.

“It’s…we don’t do it a lot, the squadron. We all left people behind.” She cfelt Rey stiffen at that. The bits Pava’s gleaned about who and where Rey was before she was here are upsetting to say the very least. “We didn’t want to. We want them back, all of us, even Prindel, whose parents are huge jerks. But until we win,” she trailed off.

“I think I will come with you.”

Pava didn’t screech or leap into the air or kiss anyone or hug anyone. It was a near thing, but she didn’t. “I’m glad,” she said instead. “And the General will be, too. And Poe, and Finn. Finn’s probably all healed by now.”

“I hope so. He looked so still when I left him.” Rey twitched one shoulder as if to shake off something perched there. “I didn’t leave him behind, not like, not like that.”

“I know.” Pava knew, too, that Rey wasn’t talking to her. “I know that, Rey. So does he.”

“When we go back, I’ll take the _Falcon_. R2 and Chewie need to be back at the base anyway, I’ll pilot them.”

“That makes sense.” _That sucks_.

“Bet I beat you back.” They grinned at each other.

Pava, again, didn’t kiss her, just said with more cockiness than she really felt, “I will take that bet and, as R3 says to me, you’ll be a sad sorry meatbag by the end of this.” 

* * *

The trip back was more eventful than the trip there. For one, they kept a channel open between the _Mercator_ and the _Falcon_ , so even though Pava didn’t get to be near Rey they got to talk and laugh and argue. R3 and R2 played holo chess for hours, muttering at each other in binary until another being on their ship got too sick of the sounds and shooed them away. Chewie mostly stayed off the line, doing maintenance and trying very hard, Rey confided in Pava, not to let his grief overwhelm him.

“It’s hard for him, being on the ship without Solo.”

“I can imagine.”

Pava, for the most part, fiddled with things that were working just fine. She felt restless. Not restless like the compulsion was flaring up, but restless like someone who’s been on bed rest and is finally allowed up. Part of it was the way Master Luke had quieted the noise of the Force, given her a break from it. Part of it was being back on a ship - she liked land just fine but always slept better on board. Part was R3, who was less open time-wise with having another astromech droid around. Probably most of it was Rey being there but not there, hearing her but not actually being around her.

Normally Pava didn’t fall like this. That was the weird part. Normally she got a quick crush and got it out of her system right away. This had been something else. They’d only met a couple of times, only spoken once, before the trip, and while they’d gotten along just fine, the spark that had been there hadn’t been anything like what Pava would assume would be needed for it to turn into this full-fledged _something_. They’d talked, just a little, about the fighters: Rey had asked a sophisticated technical question, Pava had grinned and dived in, and they’d talked for maybe five minutes before Pava’d had to hop up and go on recon. It’d been nothing at all to create the kind of connection they both felt - the way Rey had greeted her, the way Rey acted, Pava didn’t think she was misreading this. There was something there. And now, here, onboard with Rey sort of right there but also not at all, her skin felt like it was itching all the time.

* * *

 

Finally they landed. The job the General had mentioned had fallen through, so they were back a little early. Pava disembarked first, saw Prindel loitering trying very hard to look nonchalant. “Prindel!” she shouted, laughed, “Hi, hi, how are you?”

The friends hugged. Pava heard binary mutters from behind her. “Oh, Prindel, this is R3-M5, she runs the _Mercator_ , she’s an evil genius and I want to be her when I grow up.” R3 whistled, very nearly a laugh, and Prindel bowed slightly.

“Pava?” Rey peered out of the hatch of the _Falcon_ , looked around. They made eye contact, and Pava nodded her over.

“Rey, this is Bollie Prindel, my very good friend. Prindel, this is Rey, she’s—well.” Pava made a few aborted attempts at a gesture ( _I like her_ / _she’s new_ / _please help me get her to stay_ ) but Prindel soothed her, a gesture of calm.

“Sorry, what’s with the,” Rey waved her hands meaninglessly, like Dameron had when Prindel had cussed him out once.

“Prindel’s people, they use gestures and body language like intonation, like accent. It’s really interesting, you can add so much meaning to your words with it.” Pava drank in Rey’s face, took a breath. “If you say, ‘Shut up,’ you can mean a bunch ofdifferent things, right? Like ‘shut up because I hate you,’ or ‘shut up because I hate what you’re saying,’ or—“

“Shut up because I’m excited and disbeliving?” Rey interjected.

Pava nodded. “Yes, exactly, and it’s all in your tone and your facial expression, yes? Prindel uses gestures to add that context, and even more. The gestures can combine, so you could say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and use a gesture that is about being sorry to interrupt and also add in one that’s sort of a ‘we’ll come back to this,’ and you could leave a conversation to eat without, hopefully, insulting a person. Right?”

Prindel laughed. “I would say that’s one way to consider our language, yes. Basic is very useful, don’t misunderstand me, but it strips out subtext and for my people, subtext is very important.”

“Subtext?”

“What’s under the words, um,” Pava looked up at the mess ceiling. “Like when there’s more to what you’re saying than what you’r saying.”

“An example,” Prindel chimed in. “When someone you love is leaving on a dangerous mission, and you tell them to be safe, you’re also saying you love them, you worry about them, you’ll miss them while they’re gone, a hundred things. That’s the subtext.”

“You’ll celebrate when they return.” Rey nodded. “You’re right, it’d take a whole speech to get that all in. The words can’t get it across.”

Prindel made a gesture of support. “But we like knowing the subtext, too, what’s under the words, because if you are a person for whom that subtext might be surprising, say, you don’t know the other person loves you—“

“Or you don’t think of the mission as dangerous, Pava,” Rey said with a half-smile. The conversation had started onboard, during a long stretch of nothing studded with tiny moments of almost dying, and Pava had told a story about a recon mission she’d gone on a few years ago that, in retrospect, was very dangerous and not a good idea. Rey had ripped into her, lectured her about safety, and Pava had bristled and shouted back about risk and reward, and they’d ended the argument with cursing and storming off to their separate bunks on their separate ships. Pava’d written up what could charitably be called an incident report (not a serious one, nothing legal) and sent it to Prindel intending to be reassured that _of course_ she was in the right, _obviously_ Rey was overreacting. She’d never heard back. The argument hadn’t ever really resolved. A deep breath, and she fired back.

“It was a routine recon mission, it wasn’t dangerous!”

“Being in the air is always dangerous, you idiot.”

“You’re a pilot, too! You know there’s danger and then there’s _danger_. No call for the worried face, I’m good at what I do.”

“I’m a pilot so I know damn well how dangerous it is, and anyway that’s not the—“

Prindel’s gesture, a large one, stopped them both from bickering. “Sorry, that, it’s a rude gesture, it’s basically ‘shut the hell up,’ but much worse.” Prindel’s eyes closed, her face deepened in color. “You two need to learn to talk to each other, is all I’m saying. Rey, Pava thinks that you don’t trust her to fly smart. Pava, Rey worries about you because she cares about you. I don’t like being your translator. Rather be your friend.” Prindel stood and bowed slightly.

Pava made a series of gestures, apology and shame, and touched one hand to Prindel’s elbow. Prindel blinked slowly at her, their old way to say it was okay.

“Prindel, I’m sorry,” Rey offered her hand to shake. “Will you teach me a little of your language? It seems an elegant way to avoid these problems.”

“It is that.” Pava nodded at Prindel, made a gesture of apology.

Prindel sloped away, making a tiny gesture that Pava read as _go for it, idiot_ , all affection, and she couldn’t stop herself any longer.

A long silence stretched between them.

“New subject of conversation, please, Jessika.”

“All right.” _Don’t be a coward, Pava_. “Did you…have someone? Back home?” Pava knew her voice was too high, knew too that she was utterly helpless to stop it. Her only hope lay in Rey not quite remembering the normal timbre of her voice, but then that offered its own set of sorrows. _No winning move, Pava_ , she thought to herself.

“Jakku is not my home,” Rey said. There was always steel in Rey’s voice, even when she was laughing or joking or singing to herself almost under her breath. The steel was as much a part of her as the skin on her back. When she spat out words in anger, like she had just done, the steel flexed and showed itself in case the listener had forgotten. “And no,” she continued, softer and less reactive, “no one special, no one in particular.”

“Any reason?” _Pushing too hard, Pava_.

Rey gave an eloquent shrug. “The good ones left. Hopped a ship and went somewhere better. I stayed. No more to it than that.”

A heavy silence settled over the two women. Pava searched her feelings, but found no hints; she thought of what she would do to ease the weight if Poe was the person beside her, or Nien Nunb, or one of the techies. That, she could do. She landed a hard punch to Rey’s right shoulder, the smack loud enough to bounce echoes off the walls.

“Ow!” Rey whirled to face her, clutching her shoulder. “Jessika, what the hell?”

“Drink?” Pava asked, all innocence.

“Only if I get to hit you back,” Rey said, her grin sudden and predatory.

“I hesitate to agree to this,” Pava pointed out before she presented her own shoulder. She always, always forgot how strong Rey was. The floor was hard and unwelcoming, but Pava laughed anyway. “Help me up!”

“Your own fault,” but Rey reached a strong hand down, pulled the pilot to her feet.

“Hey, hey, be gentle with me.”

The predator grin flitted over Rey’s face again. “Never.”

Pava had never done a deed good or daring enough to earn this, never, never would or could in any possible future. She would never earn the way Rey laughed, opened the door, walked beside her to the bar. If Pava’s mother was right and there was a real High Holy Place, this would be it, and she would never deserve it.

* * *

“You’re kidding.” Rey held the metal tumbler like it was a holy relic. “Knockback nectar, really? Is it really real?”

Pava took a swig of the bitter berry beer she’d ordered and shrugged. “Try it and see. If you don’t like it I’ll get you something else, anything you want.” _Careful, Pava_. “But I think it’s probably close to real.”

Rey nodded, scooted a little closer to Pava ( _oh, goddess, keep her here and I will go to services for a month_ ), took a small sip. Pava could feel her start to shake.

“Are you okay?”

Rey turned to face her, eyes shining, and whispered, “It’s perfect. It’s horrible and it stinks and it hurts my teeth and it’s exactly like it should be.”

The kiss was always going to happen. It had been nothing if not inevitable. Pava had known that it was coming since that one charged glance before Rey left to find the last Jedi. She had known it again when she’d landed on Ahch-To and seen Rey’s grinning face, a tan hand shading dark eyes. She’d known it the third time when Rey had punched out a drunk for a perceived insult thrown Pava’s way. She’d known it over and over, half a hundred times. There was no future, no path in which Pava didn’t, at some point, lean forward and press their lips together.

Maybe it would have happened differently some other time, some other place. A reverent brush of lips on the steps of the First Jedi Temple, or a heroic swoop and dip after a bar fight. But here, tonight, it was a little sloppy, just this side of rushed. Here, tonight, Pava’s elbow jostled the plate of olives on the table, potentially toxic fumes from the horrifying drink Rey held wafted up into the smoky air, a terrible band butchered innumerable Huttese drinking songs. Two beer-sticky fingers to Rey’s strong square jaw, the kiss was all desperation and hunger and a sharp fierce joy. Pava didn’t stop herself, didn’t open her thoughts or heart to anything but the thought that this moment was the moment. And here, tonight, Rey kissed back, just as fierce and hungry. She tasted like salt and motor oil and somehow, improbably, jasmine flowers.

Pava felt Rey tense, just that little bit, and pulled back. Opened her eyes slowly to see Rey, grin gone. “Did you mean that,” Rey asked, “or was that the beer?”

“I meant it,” Pava said through a shiver. “I would have meant it that first day on D’Qar, or at the Temple, or last week, or five minutes ago. I meant it.”

Rey’s eyes traced every curve of Pava’s face. The movement pressed almost perceptibly on her skin, as though Rey was trailing long fingers along the fold beside Pava’s nose or the rise of her cheekbones. Then the touch became real, a firm grasp on her pointed chin, and here, tonight, Rey leaned in, hungry and wanting, and Pava could not stop her smile. 

After some time, they left. The cool air of night made Pava shiver. “How are you always still dressed for the desert?”

Their arms bumped as they walked ( _oh, goddess, keep her arm beside mine and I will light three candles for my mother_ ). “These are my clothes. I like them.”

“But aren’t you freezing?” It made Pava shiver to see those strips of tanned skin between strips of gauzey fabric, like secrets peeking out from behind a curtain. Every muscle in her body wanted to move forward, to trace the skin and memorize it, to share a little warmth.

Rey gave a shrug. Pava could die happy if Rey kept looking at her like that, she realized. Rey’s shrugs said more than most people’s words.

“Would you have meant it,” Rey said in an obvious attempt to change the subject, “on Jakku, for the angry little scavenger?”

“You’re still angry and little.”

“I’m taller than you!”

“Barely. But you’re not really a scavenger anymore.”

Rey stopped walking. “Shows what you know.” Pulled two small loaves of honey bread out of her robes. “No need to waste the bread, it’s free with the drinks. Hungry?” Her eyes sparkled with starlight, and Pava could barely breathe for happiness.

Pava opened her mouth to answer. Then everything went sideways. The thing, the compulsion, rose up in her roaring, a beast breaking from chains, a dam bursting apart. She was driven to one knee, she heard more than felt the sharp rocks tear through fabric and flesh. She heard a click, Rey had pulled her blaster, and would have smiled if she could have. _Trying to protect us, thinks I heard something, goddess, keep her safe and I will give you anything you ask_ , and then everything fell far away and dark. 

* * *

When Pava awoke - or, to be more accurate, when her senses ebbed back into her, slowly, begrudgingly, one by one - her impulse was to sit up straight and scream. The restraint on her leg and her own incredibly aching body made the shoot-up-straight movement more of a push up on one’s elbows, and the scream more of a whimper.

“Stop scaring the droid,” a familiar voice said. The edge of a laugh hid a deep well of concern, and she knew who it was even before she turned to face him.

“Sir, what — what did I do?” _Oh goddess, what did I do?_ “Did I hurt—“

“No.” A firm interruption. Poe looked exhausted, his usual grin only half there. His hair was a mess, like he’d run his hands through it too many times until it stood out from his head like a corona. “You got into a brawl. Four guys twice your size.”

“I did what?” It didn’t sound right. The Force, the compulsion, whatever other things it had made her do, had never taken her into a bar fight before.

“You were,” he half scowled, started over. “You stepped in to protect one of the techies. These guys were assaulting them, or about to, and you ran in there like a damn fool and nearly got yourself killed. No weapon, no backup, no armor, what were you thinking? You left Rey and her blaster, if she hadn’t gotten there in time—“

“Rey, oh goddess, is Rey all right? Did I—“

“No, dummy. She’s fine, she’s sleeping it off in her own quarters. I ordered her to stand down after she fell asleep leaning on your bad leg.”

“And she listened to you?” Pava didn’t quite mean for that to sound so disbelieving.

Poe laughed, a real laugh. “Nah. I got Finn to march her over there. He’s there now, keeping an eye on her.”

Pava breathed a little easier. Finn would keep Rey safe against any comers, even Pava, and with recent events, Pava was sure the need would arise soon enough. “The, you said a techie? Are they—”

“They’re banged up — not from you, from those assholes — but they’re steady. Wants to thank you in person when you’re up and around again. Medical droids say you need another day in bed and a few easy days after that. You gonna listen?”

Pava shook her head, not to signal no but to try and focus. The pain and the aftershocks of a strong Force compulsion had bloomed into confusion, clouded her thoughts. “Do I know them? Is that why it was so strong?”

Poe held up his hands in mock surrender. “Uh-uh, I’m not playing Force doctor here. Talk to the Jedi for that.”

“The only Jedi in the galaxy is a billion miles away from here playing penitent. I’m asking you, Commander.”

He ran a hand through his hair, squared his shoulders, and gave her his most serious face. “I don’t think it’s because you know them. Maybe you do, but it doesn’t sit right.”

“No, sir.”

“I,” he looked around the room as if the answer might be printed somewhere. Started again, “I would put more money on it being like a release valve failure. Too much time, too much tamping it down - you said the Jedi did some kind of a trance, quieted it for you?” At her nod, he continued. “I don’t know, this is all Force stuff, beyond me. I’d say the pressure built up, burst.”

“Me too.”

The two pilots sat, watched the bustle of the medical droids, listened to the thickening silence around them. “So,” Poe said, “lunch?”

“Yes, please, sir.”

Lunch turned into a nap, turned into a knock on her door. Pava mumbled something that resembled “come in” exactly enough to get the point across.

Prindel brought in a tray of food, a box of medkit supplies, and a bottle of arrack she’d lifted from goddess only knew. “Hey, you.”

“Hey, you, oh shit is that—“

“Tak sends her love. And also a stern lecture I won’t repeat, but it had a parable in the middle about a water serpent from her mythology and the moral was not to keep things inside but to share them with friends, so.”

Pava kept down a few bites of stew, let Prindel fuss over her bruises.

“So was it the Force?” Prindel’s tone was deadpan, so much so that Pava at first didn’t realize what she’d said.

“What?”

“The Force. That made you fight those goons. You know,” a gesture of _catch up already_ , “how sometimes the Force makes you do things?”

“What?!” Louder that time.

“I’m not stupid. I knew you’d get compulsive, insistent about something. I didn’t know it was the Force, though, that makes more sense. I thought you might have an innate fixation problem. People do, it’s not uncommon.”

“How’d you know it, I was, I mean—“

“Not you? Or not all you, you mean?”

Pava made a clumsy attempt at the gesture that implied assent and relief.

“Well, normally — and I say this with all the love in the world, honestly — you fight like a drunken smuggler who just got hustled at the sabacc table. This was,” Prindel paused, made a gesture for something like _one moment, please, to gather my thoughts_. “This was fluid, like dancing, and that’s not how you fight. It was more like someone, something—“

“Took over.”

Prindel made the same gesture Pava had tried, _yes, that, precisely, thank you_.

Pava shuddered. “I remember it now, I think. It felt…wrong. Like my body felt wrong fighting like that. I know how to fight, how to fight my way. This wasn’t me, wasn’t my way.”

“Not that it wasn’t effective, of course,” a gesture that meant _no dishonor intended_ , “but I agree. Drunk smuggler fighting is much more you. This was, from what you’ve said, the Force fighting with your body as its conduit. It looked wrong on you.”

“Why didn’t you say anything before?”

Prindel didn’t move or speak, blank as a sheet of brand-new film. Finally she made a gesture to ask for forgiveness. “I thought, I suppose, that you’d, what is the phrase your father uses? ‘Bow up,’ yes?”

Pava laughed, _so tired_. “Yeah, I would have, probably. Or lied. I usually do that. I didn’t know you’d noticed.”

“Not stupid.”

“Not calling you stupid. My parents didn’t know. The General doesn’t—“ Prindel’ face looked momentarily guilty. “Oh, goddess, does she know? Does the whole Maker-damned squad know?”

“I don’t think so,” Prindel said, tried to mollify. “Dameron knows, though, and you know he’s garbage for keeping secrets. I would hope,” she said more softly, “that you’d want your friends to be able to help you. I understand not wanting to tell them, but they, we, can’t help if we don’t know what’s wrong. We want to help.”

Pava scrubbed her face with one hand, met Prindel’s eyes. “What do I do?”

An elegant series of gestures ( _I feel uncomfortable, I have strong affection for you, there are many paths to the truth_ ). “Right now, I’d say you get up and come have evening meal with us. Rey’s up and around finally, I already sent her a message to come.” Prindel held out one hand in the universal gesture for _come with me_. “Well?”

A long moment of consideration hung in the air before Pava took the offered hand, and the walking stick by the door.


	5. breath is a blessing, a fuel you can hold in your mouth

“Has everyone known this whole time, what the actual hell,” Pava muttered to Prindel as they entered the dark cave of the mess. Prindel rolled one shoulder very slightly, as close as she could get to saying “who even knows” without letting go of Pava’s arm. All eyes turned toward Pava, and studiously, carefully turned back to whatever they’d been looking at before. It was as if her youngest and nosiest sister Rabbit had choreographed them all, told them when to move and how. Prindel’s gesture of _who knows_ didn’t help at all to alleviate the feeling that Pava was on display, a specimen picked apart. She felt her cheeks flare red, felt her eyes begin to water.

“Pava!” A voice called out across the room. Ziff stood on his chair and waved one hand, signaling a table in the back. His clear open face showed every feeling he’d ever felt, it always had, and Pava took a single breath of solace in the utter lack of pity or fear showing there now. Just _welcome_ , just _glad you’re okay_ , just _welcome back_.

Ziff and a few other pilots crowded around the table, hastily cleared a spot as Pava limped up, leaning on Prindel’s strong arm. “My mate Astrux and his mate Elbak want me to sit with them, Pava, is that all right?” Prindel made eye contact, which she rarely did, and at Pava’s nod went to join her mating group a few spots away. In Prindel’s culture, mate groups tended to count about five people; triads were fairly rare, and usually considered (Prindel had explained it all once under the influence of some gut-peeling moonshine) sort of juvenile. If they were back home, Prindel and her two mates would have been subtly pressured to expand by one or two before they bred. Here, though, who knows? Prindel might never breed, or might leave the triad for another, or they might all break up. Social norms were a little different when you were a scrappy rebel alliance made of a hundred different races, and when there were no real adults of your species around.

“Here, Pava, let me get your chair,” Ta’akka Wexley pulled out the seat. Snap silently offered his arm for Pava to lean on. Oddy pushed a bowl of stew toward her. Ziff poured her a cup of hot tea.

Pava burst into tears.

“Hey, Pava, hey,” Ziff clapped one rough hand on her shoulder. “Should we not have—“

“No, no, it’s fine, no,” Pava waved one hand in the air. “No, I’m just, you are all really nice.”

Snap laughed a little, patted her other hand. “Yeah, we’re awesome. Tak?”

His wife leaned into Pava, pressing her side against the pilot. “Deep breaths, darling, just breathe.”

Pava did, deep gulping breaths until her heartbeat evened out, until the fire had faded from her cheeks. The squad fiddled with utensils, ate, carefully didn’t look directly at her. Finally Pava settled, _still small stone_ , and looked up into Dameron’s eyes. “That stew still hot?”

The tension wrapped around the table eased, and everyone’s faces looked more like they were supposed to, and just when it seemed that they wouldn’t have to talk about this ( _oh goddess, please don’t make me talk about this_ ), Pava felt a sort of clenching around her heart. She could feel Rey cross the floor, like a heat-seeking missile, and she could see Dameron’s expression shift from soft/relaxed/pleased to the face that meant Officer Leadership Required. He stood, nodded at Rey (she hadn’t spoken, Pava could _feel_ her somehow). Someone pulled a chair out for her next to Pava. Pava stared at her stew.

“Hey, you,” Rey murmured. “Jessika, can you look at me? They said you were up and about, in the medbay, but I want,” a shaky breath. “I wanted to see for myself.” A pause. “Jessika?”

A rancor’s claws hooked on her neck, a TIE fighter’s engine screamed in her ears. Pava raised her face, met Rey’s eyes with her own.

Somewhere in the rest of the world Pava could hear her squad making half-assed excuses to leave. They filed past the two women, pats on Pava’s shoulders and neck and back. She could feel that Tak and Snap went just one table over, nearly near enough to touch, that Ziff and Oddy went the other direction but no further away. It felt like formation, like flying together, and Pava breathed, breathed, breathed.

“So,” Rey said, not looking away. “Sometimes the Force compels you to do things. And sometimes it nearly gets you killed.”

“The getting killed part is new.” Pava didn’t recognize her own voice. “Kind of.”

“Sure.”

“Normally I just, um, fix something that’s broken but nobody’s seen it yet, or find something lost. This was new.”

Rey gnawed on one of her fingernails, finally broke the stare. “Was it, I mean, did Master Luke do something to make it worse? Did I? The planet—“

Pava shook her head, which was a stupid mistake because _remember that beating, Pava?_ “No, and ow, but no, it wasn’t Master Luke. It’s been better, easier than it’s ever been, I think, since he—“

Rey interrupted, “I’m going to contact him. This is stupid, he should be here anyway.”

“He doesn’t need to come if he doesn’t want to, and he doesn’t want to, and besides if he’s going to come he should do it for the Rebellion or the General, not a jumped-up pilot with—“

“You are worth the trip, you _matheen_ , he would not want you to be suffering—“

“It doesn’t matter, Rey!” Their voices had been getting louder, and Pava had known, but hadn’t stopped it, and now they were being gently led out of the building by Prindel’s mate Astrux, who towered over them both. He gave Pava a nod, bowed slightly to Rey, and closed the door behind him. They were as alone as it was possible to be without going to a bunk room. Pava wanted nothing more than to flee.

“Why doesn’t it matter, Jessika?”

“Because it doesn’t.”

“But why?”

“Because.”

“Like a child, like a tiny child who doesn’t want to get in trouble, that’s how you talk,” Rey fumed. Pava could very nearly feel the heat rising off of her. “You say, ‘because,’ as if I will just shrug and walk away, as if I will decide you are too much work and just give up? Is that the outcome you’re aiming at?”

 _Don’t move, Pava, don’t move, don’t look at her, don’t say anything, don’t breathe, prey animal_. “It’s not that.”

Some of the anger drained away from Rey. Where she had been incandescent, lava too bright to look at, now she looked sad. “I’m sorry, Pava, I shouldn’t have gotten angry.”

“No, Rey, I’m - it’s me, here, with the whole,” Pava made a gesture of _who even knows_ , the thing Prindel had half-done earlier. “I just don’t want to, I guess, waste histime. If he makes the trip here, but not for the Rebellion, it’ll be.” She stopped, looked up at the sky, watched it threaten rain. “It’d be just for me, and I don’t know how to take that. The Last Jedi coming here to fix my head. You know?” Still looking up, Pava felt Rey take her less-injured hand. They stood, no more words, as the heavens opened up at long last.

Rey sent a message anyway. She didn’t let Pava read it, even though they were nestled together in Pava’s cot in Pava’s room and technically it was Pava’s datapad she was using. The pilot couldn’t find it in her to care overmuch. “What did you sign it,” she asked, mouth pressed to Rey’s bare shoulder.

“Sandworm,” Rey answered, placed the datapad on the floor, turned back into Pava’s embrace. “Seemed appropriate.”

“You had sandworms on Jakku?”

Rey glared. “Do you really, really want to talk about sandworms at this particular moment?”

Pava laughed, head thrown back, a real laugh for the first time in ages. The Force had quieted down, thrummed just under the edge of her consciousness, and Rey was here, warm and wanton, and the Last Jedi wouldn’t be here for weeks if he came at all.

They kissed, slept wrapped together, kissed some more. Rey was noisy and appreciative, made no secret and apparently had no shame. Pava had come of age in a barracks where studiously pretending to ignore whatever was going on in other people’s lives was considered polite. They walked the base carefully, Pava’s injuries healing, with bite marks and blushes, with laughter and defiant grins. Pava healed, bit by bit, and the Force only compelled her to do small things.

She sought out a medic who sat, staring, at a sharpened knife. She sat with them, talked about rice recipes, until they shook themselves out of it.

She found a small toy Prindel had lost, something from one of Prindel’s many long-dead parents, and returned it.

She ate stew in the mess, surrounded by a ribbon of care and welcome she could very nearly see: Tak to Snap to Oddy to Prindel to Ziff to Rey to her and around again. She slept with Rey beside her, too tight in the tiny bed, and woke to see Rey meditating on her cold floor. She worked on her fighter, she did the exercises Master Luke had taught her, and weeks passed like water.

“He’s here,” Rey said, peeked her head around the door. “Master Luke, he’s landing.” She looked excited, maybe guarded a bit, and Pava could have told her earlier. Had felt it coming, that power, like a monster under the water bringing ripples in its wake. Fear clutched her, just for a moment, and then Rey pulled her to her feet and led her away.

* * *

He was in a shabby ship, something that looked like it’d been hidden in a cave for years, and he had come alone, and he was here. As he disembarked, he touched one hand to his sister’s shoulder, hugged Rey, and then walked directly to Pava, stared her in the face. “Think of it as a house, Pava.” Master Luke exuded exhaustion. He had no doubt drained most of his energy getting here, to the base, with a not insignificant portion of that energy spent dealing with his own obvious discomfort. “The Force, or not the Force, sorry, think of you as a house.” He didn’t usually stammer or change his sentences part of the way through. _This is what he’s like when he’s tired_ , Pava thought to herself. _A little mad_.

“Me as a house.” _Careful with the inflection, Pava_.

“Yes. All right, so you’re a house, agreed? One of those round ones with a couple of windows you can open or shut, and a big door. You with me?”

“Yes, Master Luke.” She could feel people starting to wander off, having realized that the Last Jedi wasn’t going to put on a show for them.

“So, you’re a house, and the Force is the wind.” He made eye contact. “Yes? The wind blows but can’t get in. To the house, I mean. The windows and doors keep it out.”

“And the roof.”

“The roo—“ he paused. “No, ignore the roof. There’s a roof, obviously there’s a roof, but it’s not part of the picture we’re seeing right now. And the Force is the wind, going around the house, but the house keeps it out. That’s how it is for people who aren’t Force-sensitive. The Force is around them but can’t get to them - although,” he paused again, looked into the middle distance. “Well, no, I mean, it’s a metaphor, it’s intentionally simplified. Basically that’s the idea. So. Where was I?”

“The Force is the wind, and it can’t—“ _This is a conversation I am having in my real life._

“Right, yes, can’t get in. So for people who are Force-sensitive, it’s as if the windows are cracked open to let a little breeze inside. And this can vary, some people are very sensitive and some are less, so the windows are open different amounts. Degrees. Something. But so in people who are Force-sensitive, the windows are open a little bit, so the Force can get in and shuffle some papers, stir things up.”

“Because it’s the wind.” _This would be hilarious if it was happening to someone else, don’t you think, Pava?_

“Exactly, yes, the wind. So for you, in your case, I think what’s happened is that you’ve thrown the windows open, and the door too, and — hey, the roof, why not? You tore the roof off. And I think you did it without meaning to, because you were already, uh, windows mostly open and then when it, the Force, when you didn’t listen to it you felt like something bad happened, and your mind overcorrected, tore off the windows and the doors and the roof.” He looked so pleased with himself that Pava very nearly started laughing. _Mad old Jedi, so tired, so happy._

“So I’m a house with no doors or windows or a roof, and the wind is sort of, what? Tearing everything up?”

He nodded. “There’s no stability, no direction to it. It’s a testament to your strength of will, Pava, that you’re not a gibbering mess right now.”

“Well, not more of a gibbering mess, anyway.” _Very funny, Pava_.

He smiled. “Yes, there’s that. The point I’m trying to make is that if we can build you a door and a roof, get some half-windows up, I think it will help a lot. With the compulsions, I mean.”

“Will they stop?” The hope that leached into her voice sounded strange.

“No, probably not.” He sounded old, older than she’d ever heard him, then in the next sentence bounced back into his usual voice. “I’m not sure, honestly, and neither are the ghosts. It’s not an unheard of situation, this kind of heightened sensitivity, but it’s rare enough that previous Masters haven’t always known what to do. A lot of, I suppose, trying several paths to see what helps.” He made a gesture Pava didn’t recognize; it suggested uncertainty but also assurance. “I do think, though, that we could work together on your house. Give you back some boundaries, some protection.”

“A Jedi shouldn’t need protection from the Force, Master Luke.” A complaint, like a child, and Pava hated herself for it.

“That’s ridiculous. I damn well need protection from the Force. We all do,” he protested. “If the Force has a complete hold on you, know what you become? A Force ghost. A spirit. We’re not made for it, us mortals. We’re supposed to touch the Force sometimes, learn to notice it, not live in it and let it run us like a, like a droid or something.” A pause. “And anyway, you’re not a Jedi. You told me yourself you’d rather be a pilot. I’m not trying to recruit you, Pava.”

“I know that, Master Luke. I just feel,” she took a breath. “Weak. I feel weak, that I can’t just be like a normal,” paused. “I don’t know. That I can’t deal with the Force. That I was given some kind of a gift and I can’t handle it.”

His expression turned deadly serious. “I can understand that feeling, Pava,” his teacher voice, “but it’s wrong. You’re stronger than most of the people I’ve met in my lifetime. We’re talking about something impossibly frightening and dangerous here. If the Force was tearing through the mind of most people the way it is through yours, they’d probably have already killed themselves.” A long pause. Pava could see his face momentarily open, showed some deeper darkness than she had realized was there. Then it was gone, shuttered back behind an older man, tired, but with a mad idea that just might work. “We’re not built for it, I told you.” His metal hand twitched. “You have survived decades of something no person is meant to endure for any real amount of time. You’re a gods-damned hero, Pava, and I’m not one to say that often.”

Pava couldn’t meet his eyes, and he didn’t make her. Instead they sat down, right there on the landing pad, facing each other but not looking at each other. Pava would have felt him trying to reach her through the Force, would have heard him if he stirred. All was still and silent. Time stretched, endless and open before them, and for just a moment Pava felt the kind of calm quiet peace she had felt on the island with him before. It hung in the air, almost within reach, and Pava’s lungs filled with air, and she breathed.

“So when do we start?” Her own voice sounded small, echoed strangely, broke the spell.

“We started at the Temple, a little, although I didn’t know that was what we were doing.” Master Luke stood and stretched; Pava heard his joints crack. “I’m thinking we work on that for a while, the meditation. Get you used to it. Then we’ll try other things. See what works.”

Pava opened her mouth to respond, but Master Luke caught sight of Nien Nunb and his face lit up. “Nien Nunb!” He turned back to her. “Pava, go see Rey. Have fun. Don’t tell me anything about the fun you have, please, though. We’ll start tomorrow.”

“Yes, Master Luke.”

 

The work was hard and she hated it. She hated it more because it didn’t look hard, it looked like sitting in a room and breathing on command, and some nasty slurry in her heart told her that she should not complain, that any who looked in would see a lazy girl. Master Luke seemed to catch the edge of that thought, made eye contact, went back to his muttered instructions. She breathed, held it, let go. She had never known there were this many breaths in the world, this many ways to breathe. In out hold in your belly, in your heart, hold it in your eyes, hold it in your ears. Feel the breath circle through you, top to toe, trace its path, Breathe fast, in out so fast you almost lose it. Catch that feeling, hold it in one hand, breathe slow now, so slow you waver in your seat, hold that feeling in the other.

She hated it, and it helped, and she hated that it helped. The Jedi, Master Luke said, had placed far too much pride in their own power. Had too often assumed the Force was there to serve them, to talk to them, to help them, when in fact he was fairly sure the Force was its own entity, separate, with its own motives and goals. “It was always part of us but, I think, it never saw us. We just exist to it, like it just exists to us.” What he was trying to do, he tried to explain, was help Pava see (in a metaphorical sense, probably) the Force, and help the Force see Pava. “If you’d been trained as a Jedi, the Force would probably have seen you, but since you weren’t brought to its attention I don’t know if it knows there’s a you there. It might just see a conduit.”

“Hence the compulsions.” The General sat in, sometimes, breathed along with Pava. These sessions were harder, and better, and Pava loved and hated them. The General’s weight tipped the Force, made it feel different. Pava came to realize that she hadn’t been lying: the Force was strong in her family. Practice made her nerve endings raw, made her feel everything more. She could feel Rey, feel her frustration and laughter, feel what she was doing and where and with whom. She could feel Prindel, the tick-tick-tick of her quick mind, her quiet loneliness at the thought of a long-lost homeworld. She could feel her squadron, fireflies buzzing and flashing and trying so hard to stay alive.

Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, as Rey breathed deep and even against her, Pava looked for herself in the Force. She didn’t know if it was like a mirror, or a deep pool, or a dark cave. But she looked. Sometimes she glimpsed a small round light from the corner of one eye, the exact shade of raven-wing blue that her mother had said baby Pava’s aura was. Sometimes she closed her eyes and saw someone running away from her, someone who looked like her older sister, or her mother when younger, or maybe herself. She could feel, too, a dent around her in the Force, where its fabric bent to cradle her. That void, then, was where she stood, and when she told Master Luke about it his face lit up like a tiny child’s.

“I really think we’re making progress, Pava.” He placed one hand on her shoulder; had started wearing gloves all the time, said the rain made both hands ache. “You’ve worked hard.”

 

There were setbacks. She shook out of a trance to find one hand buried in the guts of a speeder. She fretted. She gave in to waves of self-loathing, beat herself up about all the things the people she loved had already said. Retraced her steps, hid, pushed people away. One night she got very hammered and ended up in a shoving, screaming fight with Dameron, and when Finn tried to pull them apart she took a swing at him.

“That was stupid,” Dameron said later, as she and Finn pressed cold medpacks to their bruises. “Pava’s a bar brawler can’t be beat, and you’re trained as a gods-damned Stormtrooper, Finn, come on.” He knelt, pressed a kiss to Finn’s smirk, another to Pava’s forehead. “We all know you’re working hard, Pava. Please don’t fight my boyfriend anymore, and if you wanna come fly, let me know. I’ll go up with you.”

Something leapt in her heart. _Fly_. She hadn’t, since the island, had been too afraid. Rey helped her with her flightsuit. Her hands shook so badly she was afraid, terribly afraid, to touch the controls. Dameron, shit-eating grin on his face, waited. Waited for her hands to steady, her breathing to even out. Waited for her to take the stick, to push forward, to pull up just a hair sooner than standard protocol, the way she always did.

All that weight seemed to drop away when the fighter left the ground. “Better?”

“Better,” she affirmed. “Thanks, Poe.”

“Any time, Testor.”

* * *

The weight seeped back when they landed, but it felt better, like it was more even, not concentrated in spots of agony anymore. Pava kept breathing.

Master Luke left, having given her what he could, having helped almost none with his sister’s revolution. He took Chewy with him, but left the Falcon. “It’s Rey’s,” he’d shrugged. “Han would figure out how to have a ghost just to kick my ass if I took it.”

The General had laughed, had embraced her brother and sent them back with rations and trinkets and anything she could use to tell him she loved him without actually saying it. Pava knew the impulse. She herself gave him the very worst Last Jedi holo she knew from childhood, the one where the actor playing him kept giving long eloquent speeches about the nature of the Force, how it was an all-good serene flow from one man to the other. It was the only one that hadn’t had Leia or Han in it as well, was only about a wandering Jedi who bettered everyone he met and killed a bunch of Stormtroopers. It was horrific, and Master Luke watched it with her before he left and laughed until he fell from his seat.

He gave her a stone, small and white and unremarkable. “It’s from the island,” he said, “and it’s not special at all.”

Pava smiled. “Thank you, Master Luke. For all of this.”

“It was my honor, Pava.” He clasped her forearm, squeezed just too tight. “You can try to holler through the Force but I’ll probably not hear you. Keep breathing.”

“Yes, Master Luke.”

With that he was gone, lifted into the sky, and Pava put the stone on a chain Rey gave her, and breathed. She flew as often as she could. When the Force rose up, she breathed, breathed, reminded it of herself. The breathing was for that, to help her assert that she existed. Not a conduit, but a conscious being.

It never went away. Sometimes it flared so huge she couldn’t fight it, and afterwards her shame surged, and she had a bad day or two. But then her breathing would settle, and she would go through cycles of peace. Sometimes the Force seemed to understand, seemed to offer rather than insist, and those times she felt what she thought a Jedi might have felt. Partnership with the Force, working together. It would take years, decades, her whole life, but maybe, someday.

Rey stayed. Rey slept in Pava’s cot. Rey wielded a lightsaber and a blaster. Rey flew anything she could find. Rey grew small succulent plants in their room, hands streaked with dirt. Rey took a nasty blaster wound in battle and nearly died. Rey woke up from the med-induced coma swearing in Huttese, demanding a drink.

Pava stayed, too. Stayed, breathed, flew, fought, breathed some more. The house stood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE END, FINALLY
> 
> Well there might be an epilogue someday but THE END.
> 
> A thousand thanks to everyone.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Breathe," Daveed Diggs, viewable [on Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk3lKqUnTEo), performed live at PFF! Live 2-29-2016. 
> 
> Also, writing Star Wars fic is, it turns out, incredibly difficult for me, because it's such a big wide world with such specific lanes. This is one complete story but I'm splitting it into, uhhh, let's say four parts. There are sections not completed yet, and it's definitely a WIP but I promise you, I've worked harder on this one than on any others. 
> 
> All my love to my dear LP, whose cheerleading is the reason this didn't stop at the seven handwritten pages I was compelled to scrawl at work ages and ages ago.


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